


LOWELL THOMAS, the 
author of the ever-popular «COUNT 
LUCKNER, THE SEA DEVIL” and 
other chronicles of true adventure, 
tells here the amazing story of Colonel 
T. E. Lawrence, one of the supremely 
romantic and mysterious figures of 
modern times. From first-hand ex- 
perience, for he accompanied 
Lawrence on his most daring war 
escapades in Arabia, Mr. Thomas 
depicts the young and reticent scholar 
who had chosen to lose himself in the 
desert, exploring ruined cities. At the 
outbreak of the War, we see Lawrence 
turning up just long enough to enlist 
in the British afmy and then inexpli- 
cably losing himself again in the 
desert. : 

When next heard of, without a day 
of military training and technically a 
deserter, the young Englishman was 
trusted adviser of wily old Hussein, 
King of the Hedjaz, virtually head of 
his armies and the idol of the Arabs. 
He drove the Turks from Sacred 
Arabia of Medina and Mecca and 
later engineered the appointment of 


Hussein as Caliph of All Islam. 


A fantastic and glamorous tale, 
written with all of Lowell Thomas’ 
characteristic gusto. 


(See reverse side of this wrapper for other 
titles in this series.) 











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WITH LAWRENCE 
IN ARABIA 








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COLONEL T. E. LAWRENCE, THE MYSTERY MAN OF ARABIA 










A STAR BOOK 


WITH LAWRENCE 
IN ARABIA 


By 
LoweLL, THomas 


Original Photographs 
Taken by H. A. Chase F. R. G. s. 
And by the Author 








GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING COMPANY 
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK 








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To Eighteen Gentlemen of Chicago 
this narrative of the adventures 
of a modern Arabian knight 
is gratefully dedicated 





FOREWORD 


Surely no one ever offered a volume to the public 
who was quite so deeply indebted to others, and I 
have long looked forward to the opportunity of ex- 
pressing my gratitude. To do this I must turn back 
the pages of time to the days when, accompanied by 
my photographic colleague, Mr. Harry A. Chase, and 
two other assistants, I left America to gather infor- 
mation and secure a pictorial record of the various 
phases of the struggle that was then in progress all 
the way from the North Sea to far-off Arabia. 

We had set forth early in 1917 and were expected 
to return at the end of a year or so to help in the work 
of stimulating enthusiasm for the Allied cause. The 
late Mr. Franklin K. Lane, secretary of the interior, 
suggested that I resign from the faculty of Prince- 
ton University in order to undertake this. To 
Secretary Lane, Secretary Daniels of the Navy De- 
partment, and Secretary Baker of the War Depart- 
ment, who were responsible for our becoming  at- 
tached successively to the various Allied armies, I am 
indebted for the opportunities which enabled me to 
obtain the material for this volume. This was before 
a special appropriation had been set aside for such 


work; as a result of Secretary Lane’s suggestion, 
vii 


Vill FOREWORD 


eighteen distinguished private citizens supplied the 
funds for the undertaking. 

Mr. Chase and I have just concluded a three-year 
tour of the world, during which I have shown the 
pictorial record and narrated to several million people 
the story which we brought back of Allenby’s con- 
quest of the Holy Land, and the hitherto unknown 
story of Lawrence and the war in the Land of the 
Arabian Nights. The generous praise and innumer- 
able courtesies which have been extended to us dur- 
ing this tour have been received by us on behalf of 
these eighteen nameless gentlemen. For it is to 
them that the credit is due. In Europe, Americans 
are commonly regarded as mere worshipers of Mam- 
mon; yet these financiers are typical American busi- 
ness men, and if this book proves to be a contribution 
of value because it happens to be the only written 
fragmentary record of the most romantic campaign 
in modern history, then the credit belongs to these 
unselfish, anonymous gentlemen of Chicago. For 
had it not been for them, the story of Colonel Law- 
rence’s achievements in Arabia might never have been 
told, and might. never have become widely known 
even among his own countrymen. 

To Colonel John Buchan, who in those days was 
one of the mysterious high priests of the Ministry 
of Information, I am indebted for the permit that 
got me out to Palestine at the time when other mis- 
sions were not allowed there, and at the time when 
Allenby, Britain’s modern Coeur de Lion, was leading 


FOREWORD 1X 


his army in the most brilliant cavalry campaign of 
all time. I also am deeply indebted to the great 
commander-in-chief himself, and likewise to the chief 
of his intelligence staff, Brigadier-General Sir Gil- 
bert F’. Clayton. It was they who were responsible 
for our being the only observers attached to the 
Shereefian forces in Holy Arabia. 

During the time that Mr. Chase and I were in 
Arabia, I found it impossible to extract much infor- 
mation from Lawrence himself regarding his own 
achievements. He insisted on giving the entire 
credit to Emir Feisal and other Arab leaders, and to 
his fellow-adventurers, Colonel Wilson, of the Sudan, 
Newcombe, Joyce, Dawney, Bassett, Vickery, Corn- 
wallis, Hogarth, Stirling, etc., all of whom did mag- 
nificent work in Arabia. So to them I went for 
much of my material, and I am indebted to various 
members of this group of brilliant men whom Gen- 
eral Clayton used in his Near Eastern Secret Corps. 
Eager to tell me of the achievements of their quiet, 
scholarly companion, they refused to say much about 
themselves, although their own deeds rivaled those of 
the heroes of “The Arabian Nights.” 

To the Right Hon. Lord Riddell, and to Mr. 
Louis D. Froelick, editor of “Asia,” I am grateful 
for the encouragement which led me to believe that I 
should attempt the delightful task of recording what 
little I know of this romance of real life. I owe a 
special debt to Miss Elsie Weil, former managing 
editor of “Asia”; also to Captain Alan Bott, M.C., 


x FOREWORD 


R.A.F. (Contact); to my colleague, Mr. Dale 
Carnagey, the American novelist; and to my wife— 
for it was their invaluable codperation that finally en- 
abled me to prepare this volume. 

There are others infinitely better qualified than I 
to give the world a full account of the Arabian Revo- 
Jution. For instance, Commander D. G. Hogarth, 
the famous Arabian authority who played a promi- 
nent advisory part, could easily do this. It is to be 
hoped that his archeological work and duties as 
curator of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford will 
not prevent him from preparing a final official his- 
tory. But it is to Lawrence himself that we must 
look for the inside story of the war in the Land of 
the Arabian Nights. 

Unhappily, no matter how much unselfish work a 
man does for his country, and no matter how modest 
he is, there are always people hovering about on the 
side-lines ready to tear his record to pieces. For 
instance, there are those who say that Lawrence has 
received altogether too much “publicity” through me. 
They piously declare that this is not in accordance 
with military ethics. There may be something in 
this, though I doubt it. But if there is, the blame 
should all be mine. 3 

There is no question that the praise I have given 
him has embarrassed him exceedingly. Indeed, had 
he realized when I was in Arabia that I one day 
would be going up and down the world shouting his 
praises, I have n’t the slightest doubt that he would 


FOREWORD Xl 


have planted one of his nitroglycerine tulips under 
me, instead of under a Turkish train! However, 
not only did Lawrence little dream that I might one 
day be “booming him,” as he describes it, but it had 
never even occurred to me that I should be so doing. 
The conspirators who were largely responsible for 
my coming to England were Sir William Jury, for- 
merly of the Ministry of Information, and Major 
Evelyn Wrench, of the English Speaking Union, 
and, more particularly, Mr. Percy Burton, the Lon- 
don impresario formerly associated with Sir Henry 
Irving, and Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson. It 
was Mr. Burton who came to me in New York and 
inveigled me into agreeing to appear for a season at 
Covent Garden Royal Opera-House, London, with 
my production, “With Allenby in Palestine and 
Lawrence in Arabia.” 

Another “bazaar rumor” that has been going the 
rounds is to the effect that Colonel Lawrence has 
renounced Christianity and turned Mohammedan. 
This also is the offspring of some feverish imagina- 
tion! From what I saw of Lawrence I rather be- 
lieve that he is a better Christian than the most of us. 
In his introduction to a new edition of Doughty’s 
classic “Arabia Deserta” he says of that great Ara- 
bian traveler: “He was book-learned, but simple 
in the arts of living, trustful of every man, very si- 
lent. He was the first Englishman they had met. 
He predisposed them to give a chance to other men 
of his race, because they found him bonourable and 


xi FOREWORD | 


good. So he broke a road for his religion. ‘They 
say that he seemed proud only of being Christian, 
and yet never crossed their faith.” The tribute he 
pays to Doughty might be applied equally appropri- 
ately to himself. 

Lars 


CHAPTER 


CONTENTS 


A Mopern ARABIAN KnIGHT . . ... . 
In Searcu or a Lost CiviuizaATION . . « . 
Tur ARCHAEOLOGIST TURNED SOLDIER .. . 


Tue Cutt or tHE Bioop or MoHAMMED . 
Tue Fatt or JEppAH AND Mecca... . 
Tue GaTHERING oF THE DeEsEert TRIBES 

Tue Battie at tHE WELLS or Asu Et Lissa . 


Tue Capture or Kina Sotomon’s ANCIENT 
SEAPORT 


Across tHE Rep Sea to Join LAWRENCE AND 
a ET erst eee) vce een a. ieee 


‘tum Barris or Sein Ei Hasa . . . . 
LAWRENCE THE TRAIN-WRECKER. . . . . 
DriNKERS OF THE MILK or War . 

Avupa Asvu Tayi, tHe Bepouin Rosin Hoop . 
Kwnieguts of THE Buack TENTs .. . 
My Lorp tHe CameL. . 


ABDULLAH THE Pock-MarKED, AND THE STORY 
or Ferraz anp Daoup . 


An Eve ror an Eve anp Aa Tootu ror a TootH 
A Rosr-Rep Criry Haur as Oup as Time . 
A Bepouin Barrie rn a City or GHosts . . 


Tie ReiLavive In My House... . 3s 3.8 
Xili 


109 


- 129 


137 


- 149 
- 155 
. 164 
. 174 


Ree EP 


188 


. 199 


219 
230 


X1V 
CHAPTER 
XXI 
XXII 


XXIII 


XXIV 
= XXV 


XXVI 
XXVII 


XXVIII 
XXIX 


XXX 


XXXI 
XXXII 
XXXITI 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
TurouGH THE TurkKisH Lines 1n DisGuise . . 240 
Tue Greatest Hoax Since THE Trogan Horse 253 
A Cavatry Navat ENGAGEMENT AND Law- 
RENCE’s Last Great Raip . . 261 
Tue DownFALL OF THE OTToMAN Empire. . 272 
LawreNce Ruwtes in Damascus, AND THE 
TREACHERY OF THE ALGERIAN EMIR . 288 
TaLes oF THE SECRET CoRPs . . 801 
Joyce & Co., anp THE ARABIAN KNIGHTS OF THE 
AIR e * e e s . e 809 
FrisaL AND LAWRENCE AT THE BaTTLe oF Paris 321 
LawreNcE Narrowty Escapes Deatu; ADVEN- 
TURES OF FEISAL AND HussEIN. . . . . 8389 
LAwrENcE FLEeEs From LoNDON, AND FEISAL BE- 
comes Kine 1n Bagpap . 845 
Tue Secret or LAWRENCE'S SUCCESS . . 3864 
Tue Art or Hanpiuine ARABS 374 
LAWRENCE THE Man ge) eee Ue re 


WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


on! Ni i : 
ire pk gee 


iy 





WITH LAWRENCE IN 
ARABIA 


CHAPTER I 


A MODERN ARABIAN KNIGHT 


NE day not long after Allenby had captured 
() Jerusalem, I happened to be in front of a 
bazaar stall on Christian Street, remonstrat- 

ing with a fat old Turkish shopkeeper who was at- 
tempting to relieve me of twenty piasters for a hand- 
ful of dates. My attention was suddenly drawn to a 
group of Arabs walking in the direction of the Da- 
mascus Gate. The fact that they were Arabs was 
not what caused me to drop my tirade against the 
high cost of dates, for Palestine, as all men know, is 
inhabited by a far greater number of Arabs than 
Jews. My curiosity was excited by a single Bedouin, 
who stood out in sharp relief from all his companions. 
He was wearing an agal, kuffieh, and aba such as are 
worn only by Near Eastern potentates. In his belt 
was fastened the short curved sword of a prince of 
Mecca, insignia worn by descendants of the Prophet. 
Christian Street is one of the most picturesque and 


kaleidoscopic thoroughfares in the Near East. Rus- 
3 


4 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


sian Jews, with their corkscrew curls, Greek priests in 
tall black hats and flowing robes, fierce desert nomads 
in goatskin coats reminiscent of the days of Abraham, 
Turks in balloon-like trousers, Arab merchants lend- 
ing a brilliant note with their gay turbans and gowns 
—all rub elbows in that narrow lane of bazaars, shops, 
and coffee-houses that leads to the Church of the 
Holy Sepulcher. Jerusalem is not a melting-pot. 
It is an uncompromising meeting-place of Kast and 
West. Here are accentuated, as if sharply outlined 
in black and white by the desert sun, the racial pe- 
culiarities of Christian, Jewish, and Mohammedan 
peoples. A stranger must, indeed, have something 
extraordinary about him to attract attention in the 
streets of the Holy City. But.as this young Bedoum 
passed by in his magnificent royal robes, the crowds in 
front of the bazaars turned to look at him. 

It was not merely his costume, nor yet the dignity 
with which he carried his five feet three, marking him 
every inch a king or perhaps a caliph in disguise whe 
had stepped out of the pages of “The Arabian 
Nights.” The striking fact was that this mysterious 
prince of Mecca looked no more like a son of Ishmael 
than an Abyssinian looks like one of Stefansson’s 
red-haired Eskimos. Bedouins, although of the Cau- 
casian race, have had their skins scorched by the re- 
lentless desert sun until their complexions are the 
color of lava. But this young man was as blond as 
a Scandinavian, in whose veins flow viking blood and 
the cool traditions of fiords and sagas. ‘The no- 


A MODERN ARABIAN KNIGHT 5 


madic sons of Ishmael all wear flowing beards, as 
their ancestors did in the time of Esau. This youth, 
with the curved gold sword, was clean-shaven. He 
walked rapidly with his hands folded, his blue eyes 
oblivious to his surroundings, and he seemed wrapped 
in some inner contemplation. My first thought as I 
glanced at his face was that he might be one of the 
younger apostles returned to life. His expression 
was serene, almost saintly, in its selflessness and 
repose. ie 

“Who is he?” I turned eagerly to the Turk prof- 
iteer, who could only manipulate a little tourist Eng- 
lish. He merely shrugged his shoulders. 

“Who could he be?” I was certain I could obtain 
some information about him from General Storrs, 
governor of the Holy City, and so I strolled over in 
the direction of his palace beyond the old wall, near 
Solomon’s Quarries. General Ronald Storrs, Brit- 
ish successor to Pontius Pilate, had been Oriental 
secretary to the high commissioner of Egypt before 
the fall of Jerusalem and for years had kept in in- 
timate touch with the peoples of Palestine. He 
spoke Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Arabic with the 
same fluency with which he spoke English. I knew 
he could tell me something about the mysterious 
blond Bedouin. 

“Who is this blue-eyed, fair-haired fellow wander- 
ing about the bazaars wearing the curved sword of a 
prince of ——?” 

_ The general did not even let me finish the question 


6 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


but quietly opened the door of an adjoining room. 
There, seated at the same table where von Falken- 
hayn had worked out his unsuccessful plan for defeat- 
ing Allenby, was the Bedouin prince, deeply absorbed 
in a ponderous tome on archeology. 

In introducing us the governor said, “I want you 
to meet Colonel Lawrence, the Uncrowned King of 
Arabia.” 

He shook hands shyly and with a certain air of 
aloofness, as if his mind were on buried treasure and 
not on the affairs of this immediate world of cam- 
paigns and warfare. And that was how I first made 
the acquaintance of one of the most picturesque per- 
sonalities of modern times, a man who will be 
blazoned on the romantic pages of history with 
Raleigh, Drake, Clive, and Gordon. 

During the period of the World War, years 
crammed with epic events, among others two remark- 
able figures appeared. ‘The dashing adventures and 
anecdotes of their careers will furnish golden themes 
to the writers of the future, as the lives of Ulysses, 
King Arthur, and Richard the Lion-Hearted did to 
the poets, troubadours, and chroniclers of other days. 
One is a massive, towering, square-jawed six-footer, 
that smashing British cavalry leader, Field-Marshal 
Viscount Allenby, commander of the twentieth- 
century crusaders, who gained world fame because 
of his exploits in driving the Turks from the Holy 
Land and bringing to realization the dream of cen- 
turies. The other is the undersized, beardless youth 


A MODERN ARABIAN KNIGHT 7 


whom I first saw absorbed in a technical treatise on 
the cuneiform inscriptions discovered on the bricks of 
ancient Babylon, and whose chief interests in life 
were poetry and archeology. 

The spectacular achievements of Thomas Edward 
Lawrence, the young Oxford graduate, were un- 
known to the public at the end of the World War. 
Yet, quietly, without any theatrical head-lines or fan- 
fare of trumpets, he brought the disunited nomadic 
tribes of Holy and Forbidden Arabia into a unified 
campaign against their Turkish oppressors, a diffi- 
cult and splendid stroke of policy, which caliphs, 
statesmen, and sultans had been unable to accomplish 
in centuries of effort! MLawrence placed himself at 
the head of the Bedouin army of the shereef of Mecca, 
who was afterward proclaimed king of the Hedjaz. 
He united the wandering tribes of the desert, restored 
the sacred places of Islam to the descendants of the 
Prophet, and drove the Turks from Arabia forever. 
Allenby liberated Palestine, the Holy Land of the 
Jews and Christians. Lawrence freed Arabia, the 
Holy Land of millions of Mohammedans. 

I had heard of this mystery man many times during 
the months I was in Palestine with Allenby. The 
first rumor about Lawrence reached me when I was 
on the way from Italy to Egypt. An Australian 
naval officer confided to me that an Englishman was 
supposed to be in command of an army of wild 
Bedouins somewhere in the trackless desert of the far- 


off land of Omar and Abu-Bekr. When I landed in 


8 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Egypt I heard fantastic tales of his exploits. His 
name was always mentioned in hushed tones, because 
at that time the full facts regarding the war in 
the Land of the Arabian Nights were being kept 
secret. : , 

Until the day I met him in the palace of the gover- 
nor of Jerusalem I was unable to picture him as a 
real person. He was to me merely a new Oriental 
legend. Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Bagdad—in 
fact, all the cities of the Near East—are so full of 
color and romance that the mere mention of them is 
sufficient to stimulate the imagination of matter-of- 
fact Westerners, who are suddenly spirited away on 
the magic carpet of memory to childhood scenes fa- 
miliar through the tales of “The Thousand and One 
Nights.” So I had come to the conclusion that Law- 
rence was the product of Western imagination over- 
heated by exuberant contact with the East. But the 
myth turned out to be very much of a reality. 

The five-foot-three Englishman standing before 
me wore a kuffieh of white silk and gold embroidery 
held in place over his hair by an agal, two black 
woolen cords wrapped with silver and gold thread. 
His heavy black camel’s-hair robe or aba covered a 
snow-white undergarment fastened at the waist by a 
wide gold-brocaded belt in which he carried the 
curved sword of a prince of Mecca. ‘This youth had 
virtually become the ruler of the Holy Land of the 
Mohammedans and commander-in-chief of many 


thousands of Bedouins mounted on racing camels and | 


Baits 2 ee ela ot 
a ee ee 


A MODERN ARABIAN KNIGHT 9 


fleet Arabian horses. He was the terror of the 
Turks. © | 

Through his discovery that archeology held a fas- 
cination for me, we became better acquainted during 
the following days in Jerusalem before he returned 
to his Arabian army. We spent many hours to- 
gether, although I did not suspect that it might pos- 
sibly be my good fortune to join him later in the 
desert. When we were in the company of officers 
whom he had just met he usually sat in one corner, 
listening intently to everything that was being said 
but contributing little to the conversation. "When 
we were alone he would get up from his chair and 
squat on the floor in Bedouin fashion. The first time 
he did this he blushed in his peculiar way and excused 
himself, saying that he had been in the desert so long 
that he found it uncomfortable sitting in a chair. 

I made many unsuccessful attempts to induce him 
to tell me something of his life and adventures in the 
desert, where few Europeans except Sir Richard 
Burton and Charles Doughty ever dared venture be- 
fore him. But he always adroitly changed the sub- 
ject to archeology, comparative religion, Greek lit- 
erature, or Near Eastern politics. Eiven concerning 
his connection with the Arabian army he would say 
nothing, except to give the credit for everything that 
happened in the desert campaign to the Arab leaders, 
or to Newcombe, Joyce, Cornwallis, Dawney, 
Marshall, Stirling, Hornby, and his other British 
associates. 


10 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Surely Destiny never played a stranger prank 
than when it selected, as the man to play the major 
role in the liberation of Arabia, this Oxford grad- 
uate whose life-ambition was to dig in the ruins of 
antiquity, and to uncover and study long-forgotten 
cities. 


CHAPTER II 


IN SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION 


\ , YHENwe first met in Jerusalem, and later 
on in the solitude of the desert, I was un- 
able to draw Lawrence out about his 

early life. So, after the termination of the war, on 
my way back to America, I visited England in the 
hope of being able to learn something concerning his 
career prior to 1914, which might throw a light on the 
formative period when Destiny was preparing him 
for his important réle. ‘The war had so scattered his 
family and early associates that I found it difficult to 
obtain aught but the most meager information about 
his boyhood. 

County Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, was 
the original home of the Lawrences. This may 
partly account for his unusual powers of physical en- 
durance, for the inhabitants of Galway are among 
the hardiest of a hardy race. But in his veins there 
also flows Scotch, Welsh, English, and Spanish blood. 
Among his celebrated ancestors was Sir Robert Law- 
rence, who accompanied Richard the Lion-Hearted 
to the Holy Land, seven hundred and thirty years 


ago, and distinguished himself at the siege of Acre, 
11 


12 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


just as the youthful T. E. Lawrence accompanied 
Allenby to the Holy Land and distinguished himself 
in its final deliverance. The brothers, Sir Henry and 
Sir John Lawrence of Mutiny fame, pioneers of 
Britain’s empire in India, were among his more re- 
cent predecessors. 

His father, Thomas Lawrence, was at one time the 
owner of estates in Ireland and a great sportsman. 
Losing most of his worldly possessions during the 
Gladstone period, when the bottom fell out of land 
values in Ireland, he brought his family across the 
Irish Sea to Wales, and Thomas Edward Lawrence 
was born in Carnarvon County, not far from the 
early home of Mr. Lloyd George, who is to-day one 
of his warmest friends and admirers, and who once 
told me that he, too, regards Lawrence as one of the 
most picturesque figures of modern times. 

Five years of his boyhood were spent on the Chan- 
nel Isle of Jersey. When he was ten years of age his 
family migrated to the north of Scotland, remaining 
there for three years. They next moved to France, 
where young Lawrence attended a Jesuit College, 
although all the members of the family belong to the 
orthodox Church of England. From the Continent 
they went to Oxford; and that center of English cul- 
ture, which has been their home ever since, has left 
its indelible mark on Lawrence. 'There Ned, as his 
boyhood companions called him, attended Oxford 
High School and studied under a tutor preparatory 
to entering the university. One of his school chums 


SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION 18 


relates that although not a star athlete he had a dar- 
ing spirit and was filled with the love of adventure. 

“Underneath Oxford,” this companion tells us, 
“runs a subterranean stream bricked over, the Trill 
Mill Stream. Ned Lawrence and another boy, carry- 
ing lights and often lying flat to scrape through the 
narrow culverts, navigated the whole of that under- 
ground water passage. 

“Oxford is a great boating center. Every stream 
that joins the Thames is explored as far up as any 
slender craft will float. But the River Cherwell 
above Islip is said by the guide-books to be ‘nowhere 
navigable.’ To say that is to challenge boys like 
Ned Lawrence to prove the statement untrue, and 
that is what he and a companion did. They trained 
_ their canoe to Banbury and came right down the part 
of the stream that was ‘nowhere navigable.’ ”’ 

He was fond of climbing trees and scrambling over 
the roofs of buildings where none dared to follow. 
“Tt was on such an occasion,” one of his brothers in- 
formed me, “that he fell and broke a leg.”” His rela- 
tives attribute his smallness of stature to that acci- 
dent. He seems never to have grown since. 

All his life he has been as irregular in his ways as 
the wild tribesmen of the Arabian Desert. AI- 
though he completed the required four years’ work 
for his bachelor’s degree in three years, he never at- 
tended a single lecture at Oxford, so far as I have 
been able to discover. He occasionally worked with 
tutors, but he spent most of his time wandering about 


14 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


England on foot, or reading medieval literature. In 
order to be alone he frequently slept by day and then 
read all night. He was entirely opposed to any set 
system of education. The aged professor who 
angrily admonished Samuel Johnson when a student 
at Oxford, “Young man, ply your book diligently 
now, and acquire a stock of knowledge,” would have 
been equally displeased with young Lawrence. The 
idea of obtaining a university education in order to 
take up a conventional occupation did not please him 
at all. His unconscious credo from earliest youth, 
like Robert Louis Stevenson’s, seems to have been 
that “pleasures are more beneficial than duties, be- 
cause, like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, 
and they are twice blest.” 

As a part of his early reading he made an ex- 
haustive study of military writers, from the wars 
of Sennacherib, Thotmes, and Rameses down to Na- 
poleon, Wellington, Stonewall Jackson, and von 
Moltke. But this he did voluntarily and not as a 
part of any required work. Among his favorite 
books was Marshal Foch’s “Principes de Guerre” ; 
but he remarked to me on one occasion in Arabia that 
his study of Casar and Xenophon had been of more 
value to him in his desert campaign, because in the 
irregular war which he conducted against the Turks 
he found it necessary to adopt tactics directly op- 
posed to those advocated by the great French 
strategist. | Nu 

As the subject for his Oxford thesis Lawrence 


SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION 15 


chose the military architecture of the Crusades, and 
so absorbed did he become in this work that he urged 
his parents to allow him to visit the Near East, so 
that he might gain first-hand knowledge of the archi- 
tectural efforts of the early knights of Christendom. 
In this he was encouraged by the distinguished Ox- 
ford scholar and authority on Arabia,. Dr. David 
George Hogarth, curator of the Ashmolean Mu- 
seum, a man who has had an important influence 
over his entire life down to the present day, and who 
even came out to Egypt during the war and acted 
as his intimate counselor during the Arabian cam- 
paign. lLawrence’s mother was reluctant to have 
him leave home but, after many weeks of pleading, 
gave her consent to his visiting Syria as a Cook’s 
tourist and allowed him two hundred pounds for the 
trip. His family was certain that he would return 
home after a few weeks, satisfied to settle down for 
the rest of his days and ready to forget the heat, the 
smells, and the inconveniences of life in the Orient. 

But on reaching the Near East he scorned tourists’ 
comforts and the beaten track. He entered Syria 
at Beyrouth and, shortly after landing, adopted na- 
tive costume and set out barefoot for the interior. 
_ Instead of traveling as a tourist, he wandered off 
alone, along the fringe of the Great Arabian Desert, 
and amused himself studying the manners and cus- 
toms of the mosaic of peoples who dwell in the ancient 
corridor between Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley. 
Two years later, when he finally returned to Oxford 


16 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


to hand in his thesis and receive his degree, he still 
had one hundred pounds left! 

There were five boys in the Lawrence family, of 
which Thomas Edward was the second youngest. 
The eldest, Major Montague Lawrence, was a major 
in the R. A. M. C.; the second, William, a school- 
master at Delhi, in India; the third, Frank, who 
finished Oxford and wandered off to the Near East 
with Thomas; and the youngest, Arnold, a star track 
athlete at Oxford, who is also interested in archzol- 
ogy, and for a time took his brother’s place in Meso- 
potamia. Both William and Frank gave their lives 
to their country on the battle-fields of France. 

Since the war Major Montague Lawrence has 
taken up work as a medical missionary in China far 
up on the Tibetan frontier; their mother has also gone 
to this remote corner of Central Asia, while her 
youngest son is roaming around the museums of the 
world on a traveling fellowship from Oxford, study- 
ing the sculpture of the period of the decadence of 
Grecian art. 

Several years before the war an expedition from 
Oxford, headed by Lawrence’s friend Hogarth, the 
great antiquarian and archeologist, began excavating 
in the Euphrates Valley, hoping to uncover traces of 
that little-known ancient race, the Hittites. Be- 
cause of his intimate knowledge of their language and 
his sympathetic understanding of their customs, Law- 
rence was placed in charge of the digging gangs of 
unruly Kurds, Turkomans, Armenians, and Arabs. 


Anata ke 


SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION 17 


This expedition eventually succeeded in uncovering 
Carchemish, the ancient capital of the Hittite Em- 
pire, and there, amid the ruins of that long-forgotten 
city, Lawrence amused himself studying inscriptions 
on pottery and joining up the various stages of Hit- 
tite civilization. He and his associate, C. Leonard 
Woolley, director of the expedition, actually un- 
covered ruins which proved to be the missing link be- 
tween the civilizations of Nineveh and Babylon and 
the beginnings of Greek culture in the islands of the 
Mediterranean, which extend back for five thousand 
years. ‘The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford contains 
many exhibits “presented by 'T. EK. Lawrence” before 
he was twenty years of age. 

An American traveler and director of missions in 
the Near East happened to visit the camp of these 
lonely excavators. He gives us a vivid picture of his 
visit and an indication of how Lawrence received the 
training which enabled him to gain such an amazing 
hold over the desert tribes when the Great War over- 
took him. 

“It was in 1913,” says Mr. Luther R. Fowle. 
“Easter vacation at the American College in Aintab 
had given us the opportunity to make the three days’ 
trip by wagon to Curfa, the ancient Edessa. After 
Curfa, we had visited Haraun, a few miles to the 
south, whither Abraham migrated from Ur of the 
Chaldees. 

“Our return trip to Aintab was by the road farther 
to the south, which brought us to the Euphrates River 


18 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


at Jerablus, over which the Germans were building 
their great railway bridge, an essential link in the 
Berlin-to-Bagdad dream. On the western bank, a 
few hundred yards from the bridge, was the site of 
Carchemish, and there we found the quiet British 
scholar, who, under the stress of the war, was soon 
to turn from his digging among the ancient ruins be- 
side the Kuphrates to become a shereef of Mecca and 
leader of a vast Bedouin host in a successful war to 
throw off the Ottoman yoke. 

“Mr. Woolley, the archeologist in charge of the 
work of excavation of Carchemish, had just come 
from the diggings, clad in his business dress of gray 
flannel shirt and golf-trousers. Lawrence, his youth- 
ful associate, also fresh from the works, was stepping 
lightly across the mounds of earth clad in what we 
Americans would call a running-suit and wearing at 
his belt the ornate Arab girdle with its bunch of tas- 
sels at the front, the mark of an unmarried man. 
But he was out of sight in a moment; and when we 
gathered for supper the freshly tubbed young man 
in his Oxford tennis-suit of white flannel bordered 
with red ribbon, but still wearing his Arab girdle, 
Jaunched into the fascinating story of the excava- 
tions; of relations with the Kurds and Arabs about 
them; of his trips alone among their villages in search 
of rare rugs and antiquities, that gave opportunity 
for cultivating that close touch and sympathy with 
them that subsequently was the basis of his great 
service in the time of his country’s need. The meal 


SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION 19 


was delicious and was served by a powerful, swarthy 
Arab in elegant native dress, with enough daggers 
and revolvers in his girdle to supply a museum. 
Soon he entered with the coffee, delicious as only 
Turkish coffee rightly made can be. And our British 
friends, who were hardly able to find interest in the 
Roman nut-dishes merely a couple of thousand years 
old and part of the rubbish to be cleared away before 
reaching the Hittite ruins, pointed out with pride 
that our little brown earthenware coffee-cups were 
unquestionably Hittite and probably not far from 
four thousand years old. 

“I should not say ‘buildings,’ or even ‘building,’ but 
rather ‘room’; for we learned that the British Govern- 
ment, because of an understanding with the Turkish © 
authorities, had given permission to build only one 
room. Accordingly Woolley and Lawrence had built 
a room of two parallel walls about ten feet apart, ex- 
tending fifty feet south, then thirty-five feet westward, 
and again fifty feet north. Closed at both ends, this 
giant letter U was indeed a room; and, although some- 
what astonished, the Turkish Government had to con- 
cede the fact. Of course, the honorable inspector 
could not object if little partitions were run across 
to separate the sleeping portions from the dining- 
room and office, and in due time convenience de- 
manded that doors be opened from various parts of 
the structure into the court. Thus it was that, when 
we first saw it, on the right was a series of rooms for 
the storage of antiquities and for photographic work; 


20 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


on the left were the sleeping-rooms of the excavators 
and their guests; and in the center was the delightful 
living-room with open fireplaces, built-in bookcases 
filled with well-worn leather-bound volumes of the 
classics with which a British scholar would naturally 
surround himself, and a long table covered with the 
current British papers as well as the archeological 
journals of all the world. 

“Around the fireplace we learned much of the good 
faith and friendship that existed between these two 
lone Englishmen ard the native people around them. 
They insisted that they were safer on the banks of the 
Euphrates than if they had been in Piccadilly. The 
leaders of the two most feared bands of brigands in 
the region, Kurdish and Arab, were faithful em- 
ployees of the excavators, one as night-watchman, the 
other in a similar position of trust. Of course there 
was no stealing and no danger. Had not these men 
eaten of the Englishman’s salt? Moreover, the even- 
handed justice of the two Englishmen was so well 
known and respected that they had come to be the 
judges of various issues of all sorts between rival vil- 
lages, or in personal disagreement. Never abusing 
their prerogatives, their decisions were never ques- 
tioned. Lawrence had recently been out to a village 
to settle the difficulties arising out of the kidnapping 
of a young woman by the man who wished to marry 
her and who had been unable to overcome her father’s 
objections. Could any training have been better for 


SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION 21 


the part he was to play in the great Arab awakening 
than these experiences among the native people? 

“In the living-room was an ancient wooden chest 
which may once have held the dowry of a desert bride, 
but which now served as money-box and safety- 
deposit vault. Larger than a wardrobe-trunk, there 
it stood, unlocked and unguarded. It was full of the 
silver money with which to pay the two hundred men 
working on the excavations. But such was the un- 
written law of the community, such the love of the 
workers for their leaders, and so sure and summary 
the punishment which they themselves would mete 
out to any of their number taking advantage of this 
trust, that the cash could not have been safer in the 
vaults of the Bank of England itself. 

“All this contrasted sharply with the methods and 
experiences of the German engineers half a mile 
away, building the Bagdad railway-bridge across the 
Euphrates. They and their workers seemed fated to 
mutual distrust and hatred. The Teuton could not 
see why the Arab should not and would not accept his 
régime of discipline and punishment. The Germans 
were always needing more laborers, while the 
Englishmen, a few hundred yards away, were over- 
whelmed with them. Once when the latter were 
forced to cut down their staff they tried in vain to 
dismiss fifty men. ‘The Arabs and Kurds just smiled 
and went on with their work. ‘They were told they 
would get no pay, but they smiled and worked on. 


22 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


If not for pay, they would work for the love of it and 
of their masters. And so they did. Nor was the 
excavation without interest to those simple men. 
They had caught the enthusiasms of their leaders, 
who had taught them to share in the joy of the work; 
their digging was not meaningless toil for foreign 
money, but was rather a sharing of the joy of 
archeology. 

“We retired for the night, our minds filled with the 
stories of the East, in which Christian and pagan, 
Hittite, Greek, and Roman, the great past and the 
sordid present of these regions were mingled with the 
background of energetic German effort and the calm 
achievement by two modest and capable representa- 
tives of the British breed of men. We slept long and 
well on the familiar folding cots in our clean, mud- 
walled room; nor were our s umbers troubled by our 
bed-covers, Damascus yorgans of cloth of gold, upon 
which a rare arabesque on its background of dull red 
invited the eye to journeys without end. These 
ancient covers were some of Lawrence’s treasures, 
brought back from his frequent trips to the Arab vil- 
lages, when for weeks his whereabouts were unknown. 
It was during these journeys that he in native garb 
joined in the conversation of the village elders on the 
shady side of a tent, or came to understand and ad- 
mire the Arab in quiet intercourse before an open 
fire, where, sitting cross-legged on the floor, when the 
coffee had been made and silently drunk, one and 
another spoke. While forty German engineers were 


SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION 23 


building their bridge, which was to enable them to 
coerce these people in case they would not obey, one 
broad-minded kindly Englishman was unconsciously 
preparing to become the man who in the great crisis 
was to lead this people, not only to destroy the Teuton 
dream of conquest, but to break the centuries-old 
political servitude of the Turk. 

“After breakfast we were examining the mosaic 
floor of the dining-room, a Roman fragment that 
these men had taken out whole rather than destroy it 
in their search for the Hittite antiquities hidden be- 
low. But just then word came of excitement at the 
‘works.’ We hurried over to find the Arabs and 
Kurds closely packed around a large excavation. 
The Greek foreman was removing the age-old earth 
about a dark stone several feet square; and by the time 
Mr. Woolley had reached his side, he had determined 
which was the real face of the block. With practised 
hand, Mr. Woolley began to remove the last crust of 
soil which covered the treasure underneath. There 
was no one to command those peasants to go back to 
their work, for the spiritual fruits of discovery belong 
to all, to the Englishman no more than to the water- 
boy who left his donkey to find the Euphrates alone, 
while he joined the breathless group whose eyes were 
glued on Woolley’s jack-knife deftly doing its work. 
A burst of applause greeted the first appearance of 
something in relief on the hard rock. It was a hand! 
no—a corner of a building!—a lion!—a camel! Guess 
and conjecture flew about, to be greeted by approval 


24 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


or derision, always followed by quick, tense silence, 
while the jack-knife did its work. Soon Woolley’s 
trained eye revealed to him that it was a large animal 
standing in a perfect state of preservation and that 
he was uncovering its head. His feint to begin at 
the other end of the figure was greeted by a babble 
of protest from his workmen, not yet sure what the 
figure was. Woolley’s quick smile acknowledged the 
reception of his little joke, and back he went to the 
spot already uncovered. Soon head, chest, legs, 
body, came to light, and exponents of various theories 
——cow, horse, sheep—were still backing their claims 
in musical gutturals when Woolley’s hand returned 
to the head of the animal and with a few quick mo- 
tions lifted off the earth which covered the perfect 
tracery of a magnificent pair of antlers; alive with 
the undying art of forty centuries, there stood re- 
vealed before us a superb stag. Such a discovery 
was worth a celebration, and unwritten law had or- 
dained the nature of it. For the excavator nodded 
in response to the Greek’s whispered query; and, as 
he gave the awaited signal, two hundred boys from 
fifteen to sixty-five emptied all the chambers of their 
revolvers in the air. I wonder what the Germans 
thought as they heard the volley from their bridge; 
for, as I found out a few weeks later when I had 
galloped over for another visit with the Englishman, 
shots at the German place meant something far dif- 
ferent. To-day, perspiring as much because of their 
intense excitement over the discovery of the Hittite 


SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION 25 


stag as from their labors, the Arabs laughingly sat 
down to smoke the cigarettes which ended these cele- 
brations, while the water-boy started wildly in search 
of his donkey, followed by the vigorous epithets of his 
thirsty friends, who knew that the full flavor of a 
cigarette comes only with a drink of cold water. 

“Noon came all too soon; and it was Thursday, the 
pay-day. Friday was the Moslem Sabbath, and 
these Englishmen were too Christian in their rela- 
tions with their Moslem workers to make them labor 
on their chosen day. Our drive to Aintab was short, 
and so we delayed to see the men paid off, on Law- 
rence’s assurance that it would be interesting. 

“A table was set in the open court of the ‘room,’ 
and Woolley handed out the piasters to the line of 
workers. ‘That was simple, but the men had learned 
to bring their discoveries in on pay-days, and they 
received cash rewards for everything turned in. Of 
course, the result was exceeding care on their part to 
lose or break no fragment in their work; and in fact 
rare discoveries were sent in from all the country-side 
on these pay-days. ‘The excavators would glance at 
the article offered. One man would receive a ten- 
piaster bonus for what he brought in, perhaps more to 
encourage him than because it had any real worth; 
another would have a fragment of pottery smilingly 
returned to him by the judge, while his companions 
Jaughed at him for trying to pass off on the alert 
Woolley part of a modern water-jar. Never did the 
Englishman say, ‘I can pay you nothing for this, but 


26 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


I will keep it just the same!’ It was either paid for 
or returned to the owner. Occasionally a gold coin, 
bright as the Arab’s eyes, would reward some happy 
man; but whether he got the gold or a laugh, never 
was the decision of his master and friend questioned. 

“As we tinkled across the plain to the rhythm of 
the bells on the horses’ necks, we had food for thought 
in what we had seen. If Britain governs much of the 
world, we wondered if it did not because of the merit, 
capacity, and good sense of her sons in all lands. 
Impressions of this chance visit to Carchemish were 
deepened by residence in Constantinople throughout 
the World War, where we watched the German play 
for the big stake, of which the Euphrates Bridge was 
but an incident. And the German lost because of 
the way he went after it. 

“Thomas Lawrence worked another way. His 
extraordinary achievement was wonderful beyond 
measure. But it was not a miracle. It was but the 
outworking of intelligence, imagination, sympathy, 
character.” ‘ 

Robert Louis Stevenson in “An Apology for 
Idlers” deplores that “many who have ‘plied their 
book diligently’ and know all about some branch or 
other of accepted lore, come out of the study with an 
ancient and owl-like demeanor, and prove dry, stock- 
ish and dyspeptic in the better and brighter parts of 
life.” But in Lawrence Stevenson would have 
found a kindred spirit. Though scholar and scientist, 
he is neither bookish nor owlish. During the early 


SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION 27 


days of the Arabian Revolution, a Captain Lloyd, 
now Sir George Lloyd, recent governor of Bombay, 
was in the desert with him for a short while. He 
once said to me: “It is difficult to describe the de- 
light of intimate association with such a man. I 
found him both poet and philosopher, but possessor 
of an unfailing sense of humor.” 

Mr. Luther Fowle’s description of that “U-shaped 
room” at Carchemish is an illustration of this same 
sense of humor which makes Lawrence so thoroughly 
human, and which saved his life on more than one 
occasion. Major Young, of the Near Eastern Secret 
Corps, who in pre-war days had known Lawrence in 
Mesopotamia, relates another incident. Representa- 
tives of England, Germany, France, Russia, and 
Turkey met in 1912 and agreed to an arrangement 
which gave the Germans control of the important 
strategic harbor of Alexandretta, and also permis- 
sion to continue the railway which they long had 
wanted to extend through from Berlin to Bagdad in 
order to open up a direct route to the treasure-vaults 
of Hindustan and Far Cathay. Lawrence, with his 
intimate knowledge of history, saw in this a bold Prus- 
sian threat against British power in Asia. Upon 
learning of the agreement he immediately hurried 
down to Cairo, demanded an audience with Lord 
Kitchener, and asked K. of K. why Germany had 
been permitted to get control of Alexandretta, the 
vital port to which Disraeli referred when he said that 
the peace of the world would one day depend on the 


28 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


control of that point on the coast of Asia Minor to- 
ward which the finger of Cyprus pointed. Kitchener 
replied: 

“I have warned London repeatedly, but the 
Foreign Office pays no attention. Within two years 
there will be a World War. Unfortunately, young 
man, you and I can’t stop it, so run along and sell 
your papers.” 

Although deeply chagrined because Britain, 
wrapped in slumber, had allowed Germany to extend 
her sphere of influence all the way from the Baltic to 
the Persian Gulf, Lawrence decided to amuse him- 
self by “pulling the leg” of the German engineers 
who were working with feverish haste on the Berlin- 
to-Bagdad Railway. Loading sections of drainage- 
pipe on the backs of mules, he transported them from 
Carchemish to the hills which looked down on the 
new railroad right of way. ‘There he carefully 
mounted them on piles of sand. The German en- 
gineers observed them through their field-glasses, 
and, as Lawrence had hoped, they mistook these 
harmless and innocent pipes for British cannons. 
Frantically they wired to both Constantinople and 
Berlin declaring that the British were fortifying all 
the commanding positions. Meanwhile, Lawrence 
and Woolley were laughing up their sleeves. 

At Jerablus, northeast of Aleppo, the Germans 
were at work on a great bridge over the Euphrates. 
In their typically German way they painted numbers 
on the coats of their native workmen as a means of 


SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION 29 


identifying them. They never even attempted to 
learn their names. They even committed the folly 
of allowing blood-enemies to dig together. Of 
course, instead of digging holes for bridge-piles, they 
dug holes in each other. This went on for a time, and 
then the seven hundred Kurd workmen turned on 
their German masters and attacked them. Three 
hundred of the digging gang at Carchemish joined 
their relatives and started a simultaneous attack from 
the rear. Fortunately for the kaiser’s myrmidons, 
Lawrence and Woolley arrived on the scene in time 
to prevent a massacre. As a result of their heroism 
both archeologists were awarded the Turkish order of 
the Medjidieh by the sultan. That was early in 1914, 
before the Great War found Lawrence. 

One of his first expeditions in the Near East was 
for the Palestine Exploration Fund. Lawrence and 
Woolley attempted to follow the footsteps of the 
Israelites through the Wilderness. Along with other 
discoveries they found what is believed to be the 
Kadesh Barnea of the Bible, the historic spot where 
Moses brought water gushing from the rock. First 
they located a place in the Sinai Peninsula which the 
Bedouin called Ain Kadis, where there was one in- 
significant well; and perhaps it was there that the 
Israelites began complaining to Moses regarding the 
shortage of water. 

“If that really was the place,” remarked Law- 
rence, “one could hardly blame the Israelites for 
grousing.” 


30 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Some five miles distant the two archeologists came 
upon a number of fine springs in a little valley called 
Gudurat, and they are of the opinion that this was 
where Moses succeeded in regaining the confidence of 
the children of Israel, by quenching their thirst with 
the sparkling waters of these springs. Later on 
Woolley and Lawrence wrote a small book concerning 
this expedition entitled, ‘““The Wilderness of Sin.” 
In it they tell of finding traces of a civilization dating 
back to 2500 B. c., the oldest traces of human habita- 
tion ever discovered on the Sinai Peninsula. 

Woolley has written a delightful book published 
by the Oxford University Press entitled, “Dead 
Towns and Living Men,” in which he describes the 
archeological experiences of Lawrence and himself 
before the World War. One story throws consid- 
erable light on the differences between the methods of 
these two men in dealing with the natives and the 
tactics of the Germans at work on the Berlin-Bagdad 
line: 


Our house-boy, Ahmed, was coming back one day from 
shopping in the village, and passed a gang of natives work- 
ing on the railway whose foreman owed him money. Ahmed 
demanded payment of the debt, the foreman refused, and a 
wordy wrangle followed. A German engineer on his rounds 
saw that work was being hindered by an outsider, but in- 
stead of just ordering him off, he called up the two soldiers 
of his bodyguard, seized the unfortunate Ahmed, and with- 
out any inquiry as to the origin of rights of the dispute, had 


SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION 31 
him soundly flogged. Ahmed returned to the house full of 


woe, and as I was away Lawrence went up to the German. 
camp to seek redress. 

He found Contzen and told him that one of his engineers 
had assaulted our house-servant and must accordingly 
apologize. Contzen pooh-poohed the whole affair. When 
Lawrence showed him that he was in earnest, however, he 
consented to make inquiries and sent for the engineer in 
question. After talking to him he turned angrily on Law- 
rence: “I told you the whole thing was a lie,” he said; 
“Herr X never assaulted the man at all; he merely had 
him flogged 

“Well, don’t you call that an assault?” asked Lawrence. 

“Certainly not,” replied the German. “You can’t use 
these natives without flogging them. We have men thrashed 
every day; it’s the only method.” 

*“We’ve been here longer than you have,” Lawrence re- 
torted, “and have never beaten one of our men yet, and we 
don’t intend to let yow start on them. That engineer of 
yours must come down with me to the village and apologize 
to Ahmed in public.” 

Contzen laughed. ‘Nonsense!’ he said, and then, turn- 
ing his back ; “the incident is closed.” 

“On the contrary,” replied Lawrence, “if you don’t do as 
I ask I shall take the matter into my own hands.” 

Contzen turned round again. “Which means—” he 
asked. 

“That I shall take your engineer down to the village and 
there flog him!” 

“You could n’t and you dare n’t do such a thing!” cried 
the scandalized German; but Lawrence pointed out that 





199 


32 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


there was good reason for assuming that he both dared and 
could; and in the end the engineer had to make his apology 
coram publico, to the vast amusement of the villagers. 


For seven years Lawrence wandered up and down 
the desert, often accompanied by Woolley but more 
frequently alone in native garb. At one time the 
British Museum sent him on a short expedition to the 
interior of the island of Sumatra, where he had es- 
capes from head-hunters almost as thrilling as his ad- 
ventures in Arabia. But of these we could never 
persuade him to speak. Some day, perhaps, he may 
tell us of them in his memoirs. 

I had often wondered why he had chosen Arabia as 
the field for his archeological work, instead of Egypt, 
which is the Mecca and Medina for most men who 
love to dig among the ruins of antiquity. His reply 
was typical of him. He said: 

“Egypt has never appealed to me. Most of the 
important work there has been done; and most 
Kgyptologists to-day spend too much of their time 
trying to discover just when the third whisker was 
painted on the scarab!” 


CHAPTER III 
THE ARCHAOLOGIST TURNED SOLDIER 


i ORD KITCHENER’S advice and his own 
personal observations led Lawrence to be- 
lieve that a crash was imminent. When it 

came he at once attempted to enlist as a private in the 

ranks of “Kitchener’s Mob.” But members of the 

Army Medical Board looked at the frail, five-foot- 

three, tow-headed youth, winked at one another, and 

told him to run home to his mother and wait until 
the next war. Just four years after he had been 
turned down as physically unfit for the ranks, this 
young Oxford graduate, small of stature, shy and 
scholarly as ever, entered Damascus at the head of 
his victorious Arabian army. Imagine what the 
members of the medical board would have said if 
some one had suggested to them in 1914 that three or 
four years later this same young man would decline 
knighthood and the rank of general and would even 
avoid the coveted Victoria Cross and various other 
honors! 

After his rejection Lawrence returned to his 
ancient ruins and toiled lovingly over inscriptions 
that unlocked the secrets of civilizations that flour- 


ished and crumbled to dust thousands of years ago. 
33 


34 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


But, with many other scientists, scholars, and a few 
young men of exceptional ability, such as Mark 
Sykes, Aubrey Herbert, Cornwallis, Newcombe, and 
others, he was summoned to headquarters in Cairo by 
Sir Gilbert F. Clayton. ‘Though he was then only 
twenty-six years old, he was already familiar with 
Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and 
Persia. He had lived with the wild tribesmen of the 
interior, as well as with the inhabitants of the princi- 
pal cities such as Aleppo, Mosul, Bagdad, Beyrouth, 
Jerusalem, and Damascus; in fact, his knowledge of 
some parts of the Near East was unique. He not 
only spoke many of the languages, but he knew the 
customs of all the different nationalities and their 
historical development. To begin with, he was 
placed in the map department, where generals spent 
hours poring over inaccurate charts, discussing plans 
for piercing vulnerable spots in the Turkish armor. 
After working out a scheme they would turn, not in- 
frequently, and ask the insignificant-looking subal- 
tern if, in view of his personal knowledge of the 
country, he had any suggestion to offer. Not infre- 
quently his reply would be: 

“While there are many excellent points in your 
plan, it is not feasible except at the expense of 
great loss of time in building roads for transport of 
supplies and artillery, and at needless expense of 
lives in maintaining lines of communication through 
the territory of hostile native tribes.” 

Then, as an alternative, he would point out a safer 


ARCHAOLOGIST TURNED SOLDIER 35 


and shorter route, with which he happened to be 
familiar because he had tramped every inch of it afoot 
while hunting for lost traces of the invading armies of 
Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, and Crusaders. 'The 
most staid old army officers on the staff put their con- 
fidence in this quiet-voiced junior lieutenant, and in 
a short time he had established a reputation for him- 
self at G. H. Q. 

Later on in Arabia, Lawrence frequently outwitted 
the Turks because of this same superior knowledge 
of the topography of the country. He was better ac- 
quainted with many distant parts of the Turkish 
Empire than were the Turks themselves. 

From the map department he was transferred to 
another branch of the Intelligence Service, which 
dealt mainly with affairs inside the enemy lines. It 
was his duty, as one of the heads of the Secret Corps, 
to keep the commander-in-chief informed of the 
movements of various units of the Turkish army. 
Sir Archibald Murray, then head of the British 
Forces in the Near East, has told me how highly he 
valued the knowledge of this youth under whom were 
the native secret agents who passed back and forth 
through the Turkish lines. 

It was in the summer of 1915 that the Hedjaz 
Arabs broke out in revolt against their Turkish mas- 
ters in that part of the Arabian peninsula which lies 
mainly between the Forbidden City of Mecca and the 
southern end of the Dead Sea, known as Holy 
Arabia. 


36 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


In order to understand the reasons for the out: 
break of this revolution, and in order to appreciate 
the delicate and complicated problems which Law- 
rence was to face upon his arrival in Arabia after the 
Arabs had won a few initial victories and were con- 
fronted with the probability of their revolt collaps- 
ing, let us digress for a moment and glance in retro- 
spect through the pages of Arabian history and 
refresh our memories regarding the romantic story 
of this historic peninsula and its picturesque peoples. 

Legend tells us that Arabia was the home of our 
common ancestors, Adam and Eve, the land of the 
queen of Sheba, home of the heroes of “The Arabian 
Nights, ” and a country peopled by a race that lived 
and hoped and loved before even the prehistoric 
mound-builders dwelt on the plains of North Amer- 
ica, and before the druids in woad built their rock 
temples in Britain. Tradition tells us that it is a 
land whose peoples founded empires centuries before 
Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt, per- 
haps even before Khufu built the Great Pyramid. 
Archeologists, who have risked their lives to solve 
Arabia’s mysteries, tell us that great cities flourished 
and fell there long before the days of Tut-ankh- 
Amen and that in one distant corner of the country 
the great King Hammurabi formulated his code of 
justice long before Buddha taught on the banks of 
the Ganges and before Confucius enunciated the 
principle of the Golden Rule. 

Jazirat-ul-Arab, the Peninsula of the Arabs, is 


il eee ta a 


ARCHAOLOGIST TURNED SOLDIER 37 


larger than England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland; Hol- 
land, Belgium, France, and Spain all combined. The 
Greeks and Romans traded, fought, and studied there 
and divided it into three geographical parts: Arabia 
Petrza to the north, Arabia Deserta to the east, and 
Arabia Felix (Arabia the blest) to the west. 

Although some scholars believe it to have been the 
birthplace of the human race, we have better maps 
of the north pole; in fact, we have better maps of 
Mars than we have of some parts of the interior of 
Arabia from whence came many of the fighting men 
of Lawrence’s army. 

The distance from the city of Aleppo, at the ex- 
treme north, to the city of Mecca, half-way down the 
western coast of Arabia, is as great as the distance 
from London to Rome. Yet Lawrence and his men 
trekked all the way from Mecca to Aleppo on the 
backs of camels, over country as barren as the moun- 
tains of the moon. 

In order to keep from becoming confused by the 
strange Arabic names it would be well for the reader 
to keep in mind that the Arabian campaign opened at 
Mecca and moved steadily north to Akaba, and then 
on to Damascus and Aleppo in Syria. Each event 
described in this account is a little farther north than 
the last. 

Although some authorities on the Near Kast esti- 
mate that there is a total population of twenty million 
people in the whole of Arabia, for centuries a large 
portion of them have been held together only by loose 


38 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


travel alliances, like those which existed between the 
Red Indian tribes of America a hundred years ago. 

The peoples of Arabia since time immemorial have 
been divided into two distinct classes: those who dwell 
in villages and cities, and those who wander from 
place to place with all their worldly possessions in 
_ their camel-bags. Both classes are called Arabs, but 
the wandering nomads are referred to as Bedouins 
whenever it is desired to differentiate between them 
and their kinsmen of the cultivated areas. ‘The true 
Bedouin knows nothing about the cultivation of land, 
and his only animals are his camels and horses. The 
Bedouins are the more admirable of the two. They 
are the Arabs who have preserved the love of freedom 
and the ancient virtues of this virile race. 

The foremost of all Arabian travelers was an Eng- 
lishman, Charles M. Doughty, poet, philosopher, and 
author-of that great classic, “Arabia Deserta,” writ- 
ten in quaint Elizabethan style. With the exception 

of Colonel Lawrence, he was the only Kuropean who 
ever spent any considerable length of time traveling 
about the interior of Holy Arabia without disguising 
himself as a Mohammedan. Doughty found, what 
all who know them have discovered, that the Bedouins 
are kind hosts if visited in their camps. But fre- 
quently the stranger who falls into their hands in the 
desert, under circumstances which according to their 
unwritten law do not cause them to regard him as a 
guest, finds them ruthless. In savage wantonness 
the Shammar Arabs may even cut his throat. There 


ARCHAOLOGIST TURNED SOLDIER 39 


is a proverb in the desert that a man will slay the son 
of his mother for old shoe-leather; but, despite this, 
their hospitality is so sweeping that it has become 
proverbial throughout the world. “The Bedouin 
says: ‘Be we not all guests of Allah?” Then adds 
Doughty, “After the guests eat ‘the bread and salt’ 
there is a peace established between them for a time 
(that is counted two nights and a day, in the most 
whilst their food is in him).” 

The word “Arab” comes from “Araba,” the name 
of a small territory in an ancient province south of the 
Hedjaz, which is said to have been named after 
Yarab, the son of Kahtan, the son of Abeis, the son 
of Shalah, the son of Arfakhshad, the son of Shem, 
the son of Noah, who they say was the first to speak 
Arabic, “the tongue of the angels.” They are a 
Semitic people, of the same race as the Jews. 

The world owes much to the Arabs. Not only did 
they invent many of our boyhood games, such as the 
humming top set spinning by pulling a cord, but they 
made great strides in medicine, and their materia 
medica was but little different from the modern. 
Their highly skilled surgeons were performing diffi- 
cult major operations with the use of anesthetics in 
the day when Europe depended entirely upon the 
miraculous healing of the clergy. In chemistry we 
have them to thank for the discovery of alcohol, po- 
tassium, nitrate of silver, corrosive sublimate, sul- 
phuric acid, and nitric acid. They even had 
experimented in scientific farming and understood 


40 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


irrigation, the use of fertilizers, and such things as 
the grafting of fruit and flowers. 'They were world- 
famous for their tanning of leather, their dyeing of 
cloth, their manufacture of glass and pottery, of 
textiles, and of paper, and for their unsurpassed 
workmanship in gold, silver, copper, bronze, iron, and 
steel.. 

The richest part of Arabia, excluding Mesopo- 
tamia, always has been, and still is, the province of 
Yemen in the extreme southwestern corner, a moun- 
tainous region just north of Aden, famous these 
thousands of years for its wealth, its delightful cli- 
mate, the fertility of its valleys, and as the home of 
Mocha coffee. Strabo, the Greek geographer, tells 
us that Alexander the Great, shortly before his death, 
planned to return from India and there establish his 
imperial capital. Many scholars believe this rich 
region to have been the original habitation of man 
and the country whence the early Egyptians came. 
Beginning earlier than 1000 B.c., highly organized 
monarchies existed here such as the Minzan, the 
Sabaan, and the Himyaritic. After the destruction 
of Jerusalem by Titus, many Jews fled here, and their 
quaint descendants still reside in Yemen. But when 
the Ptolemies introduced the sea-route to India, the 
Yemen became less important, and for centuries the 
best-known part of Arabia has been the province of 
Hedjaz on the Red Sea, north of Yemen, bounded on 
the east by the Central Arabian region known as 
Nejd, and on the northeast and north by Syria, the 


pe SN RE 


ARCHAOLOGIST TURNED SOLDIER 41 


Dead Sea, Palestine, and the Sinai Peninsula. The 
word “Hedjaz’ or “Hijaz’ means “barrier.” The 
fame of this particularly waterless country is due to 
its two chief cities: Mecca, the birthplace of Mo- 
hammed, in olden times called Macoraba; and Me- 
dina, the ancient Yathrib, where the Prophet spent 
the last ten years of his life and where he was interred. 
It is the duty of all Moslems who can afford it to 
make a pilgrimage to these sacred cities, just as it 
was the duty of the people to journey here in idola- 
trous pre-Islamic times. 

About a thousand years before Columbus dis- 
covered America, a boy was born in the city of Mecca. 
This boy was destined to shape very materially the 
history of the world. As a youth he herded goats 
and sheep on the hills around Mecca, and then as a 
young man he hired himself out as a camel-driver to 
a rich widow in Mecca. He used to drive her camel 
caravans up to Syria to trade with rich merchants 
there. In Syria he became better acquainted with 
the religions of the Jews and the Christians and be- 
came convinced that his fellow-Arabs, who were wor- 
shipers of idols, did not possess a true religion. So 
this camel-driver appropriated some of the tenets of 
Christianity, some of the principles of Judaism, a few 
scraps of philosophy from the Persian fire-worshipers, 
a sprinkling of Arabian tradition, then threw in a 
number of his own ideas for good measure, and es- 
tablished a new religion. He encouraged his fol- 
lowers to regard Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Christ 


42 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


as prophets of Islam. ‘To-day, however, they are 
looked upon as of infinitely less importance than Mo- 
hammed himself, whose teachings are regarded as a 
later and final revelation of the will of God. Nearly 
every family in Arabia has at least one child named 
after the Prophet. There are more men in the world 
bearing the given name “Mohammed” than there are 
with such names as “John” and “William.” 

Is it so strange, after all, that the desert should be 
the old homestead of three of the world’s greatest 
religions—J udaism, Christianity, and Mohammedan- 
ism? The Arabs call the desert the Garden of Allah; 
they say there is no one in the desert but God. Oui 
in the deserts of Arabia, even more than in many 
other parts of the world, “The heavens declare the 
glory of God; and the firmament sheweth His handy- 
work. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto 
night sheweth knowledge.” 'There is no striving in 
the desert to amass wealth for wealth’s sake; there is 
no mad rush to get ahead of one’s fellow-men. One 
of the curses of our modern civilization is that we do 


not have time to think or meditate. ‘The desert is a- 


fitting place for one to ponder over man’s destiny and 
to meditate upon the things that moth and rust do not 
corrupt and that thieves do not break through and 
steal. 
Mohammed, the camel-boy of Mecca, was the first 
man to bind together in any sort of unity the peoples 
of Arabia. He came at the opportune time when a 
great leader was needed to drive out foreign domina- 





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ARCHAOLOGIST TURNED SOLDIER 48 


tion. It was by his amazing evangelization that he 
succeeded in uniting the Arabs. To an even greater 
degree than most leaders of men this camel-boy of 
Mecca had: 


The Monarch mind, the mystery of commanding, 
The birth-hour gift, the art Napoleon, 

Of wielding, moulding, gathering, welding, bending, 
The hearts of thousands till they moved as one. 


Following the death of Mohammed came that great 
wave of fanatical fury when the Arabian peoples, 
filled with religious fervor, swept out of the desert, 
overran a great part of the world, and built up that 
huge Moslem Empire which was even greater than 
the empire of the Romans. In those triumphant 
days of Islam, the Arabs supplied the dominant re- 
ligious, political, and military leaders for all the coun- 
tries they conquered. ‘They seemed _ irresistible. 
“When the Arabs, who had fed on locusts and wild 
honey, once tasted the delicacies of civilization in 
Syria, and reveled in the luxurious palaces of the 
Khosroes,” writes El Tabari, the Moslem historian, 
“they said, “By Allah, even if we cared not to fight 
for the cause of God, yet we could not but wish to con- 
tend and enjoy these, leaving distress and hunger 
henceforth to others.’”? Within a century after the 
death of Mohammed the Hedjaz Arabs had built up 
an empire vaster than either that of Alexander or of 
Rome; “Islam swept across the world like a whirl- 
wind.” 


44 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


But the vast empire reached its zenith in the 
seventh century of this era, and its decline dates from 
the battle of Tours, a. p. 732, when the Arabs were 
defeated in France by the Christians under Charles 
Martel. 

Many of the Arabs remained in the lands they had 
conquered. As merchants and missionaries they 
have carried the crisp, brief creed of Mohammed 
from Arabia to Gibraltar, Central Africa, Central 
China, and the islands of the South Seas. Unlike 
followers of other faiths, they shout their creed from 
the minarets and housetops of every land where they 
are to be found: “a-ilahu illa Allah! Allahu Ak- 
bar!” 

And even to-day we find thousands of Arabs oc- 
cupying positions of affluence in far-off Hong-Kong, 
Singapore, the East Indies, and Spain. ‘The others 
drifted back to their old life in the Arabian Desert. 
Once more Arabia stood isolated from the world by 
the barren mountain ranges which fringe its coasts 
and by its trackless belts of shifting sand. In the 
twelfth century the descendants of Saladin, who was 
half Kurd, conquered the fringes of Arabia. ‘Then 
three centuries later a new tribe swept down from the 
unknown plateaus of Central Asia. They were of 
the tribe of Othman, forefathers of the modern 
Turks, and they attempted to govern the Arabs as 
though they were a people of an inferior race. ‘The 
Turks claimed possession of Arabia for four hundred 
years, simply because they were able to maintain a 


ARCHAMOLOGIST TURNED SOLDIER 45 


few garrisons along the coast. A few of these gar- 
risons were successful in holding out to the very end 
of the Great War, but at last they surrendered, leav- 
ing Arabia once again in the undisputed possession of 
its freedom-loving inhabitants. 

The Hedjaz tribes have never acknowledged the 
sovereignty of any foreign ruler. They have pre- 
served their liberty with but little interruption since 
prehistoric times, and consequently they regard their 
personal freedom above all else. Great armies have 
been sent against them, but not even the Assyrians, 
the Medes, the Persians, the Greeks, or the Romans 
were able to conquer them. 

Hiver since the decline of the Arabian Empire, 
more than a thousand years ago, generals, sultans, 
and califs have attempted to unify the peoples of 
Arabia, and particularly of the province of Hedjaz, 
because it contains the two sacred Mohammedan 
cities. None were successful, but where they failed, 
Thomas Edward Lawrence, the unknown unbeliever, 
succeeded. It remained for this youthful British 
archeologist to go into forbidden Arabia and lead the 
Arabs through the spectacular and triumphant cam- 
paign which helped Allenby break the backbone of 
the Turkish Empire and destroy the Pan-German 
dream of world dominion. The way in which he 
swept the Turks from Holy Arabia and temporarily 
built this mosaic of peoples into a homogeneous na- 
tion, now known as the Kingdom of the Hedjaz, is a 
story that I should have failed to believe had I not 


46 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


visited Arabia and come into personal contact with 
Lawrence and his associates during their campaign. 

Perhaps no factor played a greater part in simpli- 
fying Lawrence’s task in Arabia than the existence 
of an ancient desert fraternity which has been called 
“the cult of the Blood of Mohammed.” We must 
know something about this cult and its present-day 
leaders in order to understand the diplomacy and 
strategy of Colonel Lawrence which we are to follow 
during the desert war. 


CHAPTER IV 


THE CULT OF THE BLOOD OF MOHAMMED 


URING the long centuries of uncertain 
1) Turkish rule, there had persisted, in the 
sacred cities of the Hedjaz, “the cult of the 

Blood of Mohammed,” with its membership limited 
to descendants of the Prophet. ‘These people were 
called shereefs or nobles by the other Arabs, and they 
had never lost their hatred for the Turks, whom they 
regarded as intruders. So powerful was this cult 
that the Ottoman Government could not destroy it. 
However, when shereefs living within reach of the 
string of fortified Turkish posts along the fringe of 
the desert protested openly against Ottoman tyranny, 
the sultan usually “invited” them to come and reside 
near him in Constantinople. There they would 
either remain as virtual prisoners or quietly be put 
out of the way. Abdul Hamid, the last great sultan, 
was an expert in following this private policy of his 
predecessors, and among the prominent Arabs he 
found it the better part of discretion to have near him 
at the Sublime Porte was one Shereef Hussein of 
Mecca. He was the oldest living descendant of Mo- 
hammed and was therefore believed by many to be 


the man really entitled to the califate, the spiritual 
47 


48 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


and temporal head of Islam. ‘The title of calif had 
originally been given only to the lineal descendants 
of Mohammed but later had been usurped by the 
Turks. 

No people in the world take more pride in their 
ancestry than the Arabs. The births of all the lead- 
ing princely families are recorded in Mecca at the 
mosque built around the black stone which millions 
of people regard as the most sacred spot in the world. 
Here, on a scroll of parchment, is inscribed the name 
of Hussein Ibn Ali, direct lineal descendant of Mo- 
hammed through his daughter Fatima and her eldest 
son Hassan. 

When King Hussein was young, he had too much 
spirit to live tamely with his family in Mecca. In- 
stead, he roamed the desert with the Bedouins and 
‘took part in all their raids and tribal wars. His 
mother was a Circassian, and much of his vigor is in- 
herited from her. Abdul Hamid, the Red Sultan, 
received many disturbing reports regarding the wild 
life led by this independent shereef. Abdul had two 
ways of dealing with a man whom he feared or dis- 
trusted. He would either tie him in a sack and throw 
him into the Bosporus or keep him in Constantinople 
under close personal observation. Although he was 
afraid that Hussein might conspire against him, the 
fact that Hussein was a direct descendant of Moham- 
med made it difficult for old Abdul to chuck him into 
the Bosporus. So he gave him a pension and a little 
house on the Golden Horn, where the shereef and his 


CULT OF BLOOD OF MOHAMMED 49 


family were compelled to live for eighteen years. 

When the revolution of the Young Turks came in 
1912 and Abdul was overthrown, all political pris- 
oners were released from Constantinople, and Hus- 
sein and other Arab Nationalist leaders thought they 
saw the dawn of a new era of freedom and liberty. 
In fact, they too had assisted the Young Turks in 
overthrowing the old régime. But their hopes were 
soon dispelled, for the new Committee of Unity and 
Progress rashly set out to Ottomanize all the peoples 
of that complex of races which made up the Turkish 
Empire. They even went so far as to insist that the 
Arabs should give up their beautiful language—‘“‘the 
tongue of the angels’—and substitute the corrupt 
Ottoman dialect. It was not long before Hussein 
discovered that the Committee of Unity and Prog- 
ress, headed by Enver, Talaat, and Djemal, was far 
more tyrannical than old Abdul in his bloodiest mo- 
ments. They now looked back on the villainous Ab- 
dul as a harmless old gentleman in comparison with 
his successors. The Young Turks even suggested 
that in the Koran Turkish heroes should be sub- 
stituted for the ancient patriarchs. Words of Ara- 
bic origin were deleted from the Turkish vocabulary. 
In Mecca the exaggerated story was told that the 
Turks were reverting to the ancient heathenism of 
Othman and that soldiers in Constantinople were re- 
quired to pray to the White Wolf, a deity of the 
barbaric days before the Ottoman horde left its early 
home in the wilds of Central Asia. 


50 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Although the Arab leaders despaired of seeing a 
happier day for their country, Shereef Hussein and 
his sons concealed their hatred for the autocratic 
triumvirate and the whole Young Turk party. Be- 
cause of the help he had given the triumvirate before 
he was disillusiond as to their real aims, they granted 
him the title of Keeper of the Holy Places of Islam, 
or the sixty-sixth Emir of Mecca of the Ottoman 
period. 

Miss Gertrude Bell, the only woman staff captain 
in the British army and one of the foremost au- 
thorities on Near Eastern affairs, in a letter to “The 
Times” of London declared that the Arab Nationalist 
movement was given vitality by the Young Turks, 
who as soon as they came into power changed their 
whole attitude. 

“Liberty and equality are dangerous words to play 
with in an empire composed of divergent national- 
ities,’ wrote Miss Bell. “Of these the Arabs, adapt- 
able and quick-witted, proudly alive to their tradi- 
tions of past glory as founders of Islam, and 
upholders for 700 years of the authority of the 
Khilafat, were the first to claim the translation of 
promise into performance, and in the radiant dawn of 
the constitutional era the Arab intelligentsia eagerly 
anticipated that their claim would be recognised. If 
the Turks had responded with a genuine attempt to 
allow Arab culture to develop along its own lines 
under their egis, the Ottoman Empire might have 
taken on new life, but their inelastic mentality pre- 


CULT OF BLOOD OF MOHAMMED 51 


cluded them from embracing the golden opportunity. 
Moreover, Prussian militarism made to them a pe- 
culiarly powerful, and, if the political configuration 
of their Empire be considered, a peculiarly dangerous 
appeal. The Committee of Union and Progress was 
determined to hack its way through the sensibilities of 
subject races, and, not content with this formidable 
task, by neglecting the cautious diplomatic methods 
of Abdul Hamid it found itself involved in a dis- 
astrous and debilitating struggle with its neighbour 
States in Europe. 

“Before the war of 1914 broke out, not only were 
the Arab provinces filled with hatred and desire for 
vengeance ...” 

In the luxurious atmosphere of the Ottoman me- 
tropolis Hussein’s four sons quite naturally had 
grown up more like young Turkish bloods than Arab 
youths. They had spent most of their time rowing 
on the Bosporus and attending court balls. For six 
years, Prince Feisal had acted as private secretary to 
Abdul Hamid. When the Grand Shereef returned 
to Mecca he immediately summoned his four sons and 
informed them that they were altogether too effete 
and too accustomed to the soft ways of Stamboul to 
suit him. “Constantinople and its accursed life of 
luxury are now behind thee. Praise be to Allah! 
Henceforth thou art to make thy home under the 
canopy of heaven with thy brothers of the black tents 
in order that the glory of our house may not be dis- 
graced. Allahu Akbar!” So saying the aged emir 


52 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


fitted the deed to the word and ordered them out to 
patrol the pilgrim routes. These routes are mere 
camel-tracks across the burning sands connecting the 
Red Sea coast with Mecca, the Holy City, and the 
summer capital of Taif, and between Medina and 
Mecca. With each of his sons he sent a company of 
his best fighting men. ‘They were not even permitted 
to use tents but were compelled to sleep in their 
cloaks. They spent their days chasing robbers. 
The worst robbers in the desert are the men of the 
Harith clan, some one hundred outlaws, nearly all 
of them banished members of Shereefian families. 
These men of Harith had entrenched themselves in a 
naturally fortified village fifty miles northeast of 
Mecca. Expeditions against them and other bandits 
developed Hussein’s sons into self-reliant, capable 
leaders. That Emir Feisal is such a prominent 
figure in the Near East to-day is not entirely because 
of his royal blood but partly because he excels in ways 
which make for leadership in the Arabian Desert. 
These are not a knowledge of bridge or Browning! 
Ali, the eldest son, is a small, thin, well-groomed 
prince. He has delightful manners, great personal 
charm, and is an accomplished diplomat. He is 
deeply religious, the essence of generosity, and a 
martinet on all questions of morality. Like the 
other members of his family he has far-reaching 
views and aspirations for his country. But he has 
no personal aspirations beyond the emirate of 
Mecca, to which he will, in all probability, fall heir at 


CULT OF BLOOD OF MOHAMMED 53 
the death of his father. Abdullah, the second son, is 


ambitious and vigorous but is not quite such an ideal- 
ist. At the termination of the war he became the 
ruler of Transjordania, with a famous English trav- 
eler by the name of St. John Philby as his adviser. 
The youngest member of the family, Prince Zeid, is 
half Turk. There is not so much of the Oriental about 
him, and when the revolt was at its height he still 
lacked the seriousness of his older brothers. This 
youth left such solid enthusiasms as Arab nationalism 
to the rest of his family and devoted himself to fight- 
ing and to the lighter joys of life, as one would expect 
from a normal prince in his early twenties. He 1s 
nevertheless rich in common sense. Zeid loves hunt- 
ing, riding, and dancing. After the Arabs and An- 
zacs took Damascus he jazzed all over the city until 
Feisal convinced him that he should conduct himself 
with greater dignity. He also is a man of consid- 
erable charm and, if his ambition to attend Oxford is 
realized, may yet prove himself the ablest of an illus- 
trious family. 

Feisal, third and best known of Hussein’s four 
sons, is an idealist. Although modest and reserved, 
he is a man of great personality. very Arab is a 
born diplomat, and Feisal is well above the average. 

Children of the desert have few games. They do 
not know how to play as our Western children do. 
Life is a serious and sober affair from the moment 
the Arab baby opens his eyes on the woman’s side of 
the black tent. As soon as he is able to crawl, he 


54 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


comes into the tribal council. His only school is the 
coffee hearth; his only education consists in the hand- 
ling of men and camels. 

Emir Feisal began life as a dirty little shepherd 
boy. His mother was an Arab girl of Mecca and a 
cousin of his father. When Feisal was a little baby, 
Shereef Hussein sent him into the desert to live with 
a Bedouin tribe, because it is considered more benefi- 
cial for a boy to grow up in the open desert country 
than in a city or village. Later, in Constantinople, 
Feisal contracted consumption, but since then the 
desert has cured him. He is still very thin, however, 
and measures only twenty-one inches around the 
waist. He smokes cigarettes day and.night and eats 
sparingly. Among the tribes he is considered an un- 
usually fine shot and good horseman and an excellent 
camel-rider. Feisal is enlightened and thoroughly 
modern in his views, and Colonel Lawrence, who 
knows him better than any one else, declares that he 
is as honest as daylight. His people follow him not 
through fear but because they admire him and love 
him. He is much too kind and liberal-minded to 
rule as an Oriental despot of the old school. Given 
the opportunity, he may be depended upon to do his 
utmost to usher in an entirely new order of things 
for his people. 

Certain statesmen of world prominence choose de- 
tective stories for their moments of relaxation; Prince 
Feisal, in the lull between campaigns, refreshed him- 
self for renewed battle and the cares of state with 


CULT OF BLOOD OF MOHAMMED 55. 


classical Arabic poetry. His favorite poet is Imr el 
Kais, the most renowned of all Arab bards, who lived 
just before Mohammed, and who wrote about camels, 
the desert, and love. Among Feisal’s other favorites 
are Ibn Isham, Ibn el Ali, Zuhair, Zarafa, Al Harith, 
and Mutanabbi, great writers of the Middle Ages, 
when Arabian learning and culture penetrated to the 
most remote corners of Kurope. Mutanabbi’s coup- 
let must have struck a responsive chord in Feisal’s 
heart: 


Night and my steed and the desert know me— 
And the lance thrust and battle, and parchment and pen. 


I also saw him frequently reading the works of An- 
tara, the famous poet who wrote a huge epic of his 
own life filled with tales of raids and love lyrics. 
The recent war of liberation inspired many new poets 
to arouse the people by means of patriotic songs. 
Even the humblest camel-driver improvised songs 
built around Lawrence, Feisal, and that celebrated 
warrior, Auda Abu Tayi. 

Poetry, song, and proverb all exalt the virtue of 
hospitality among the Arabs. An Arab, from Hus- 
sein down to the humblest of his subjects, will risk 
his own life rather than allow any harm to befall a 
guest, even if the latter happens to be his worst 
enemy. For many months prior to the outbreak of 
the Arabian revolution, Shereef Hussein and his sous 
were secretly preparing for it, while leading the 
Turks to believe that they were mobilizing against 


56 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


the Allies. Emir Feisal happened to be in Damascus 
during this period as the guest of Djemal Pasha, the 
_ Turkish viceroy of Syria and Palestine. His father 
sent word to him that he had succeeded in gathering 
together a number of tribes for an attack on the 
Turkish garrison at Medina; so Feisal excused him- 
self on some pretext and said he must return south. 
Djemal urged him to delay his departure for a few 
days, saying that he and Enver Pasha would like to 
accompany him to Medina. When Feisal arrived 
at Medina with Djemal and Enver, they attended a 
review of over five thousand Arab tribesmen who 
whirled by on camels and horses, firing their rifles 
into the air. The two members of the Turkish 
triumvirate were delighted with the warlike display 
and told Feisal that his men would be of great assist- 
ance to the sultan and his illustrious fellow- 
Mohammedan ruler, Kaiser William Pasha, in their 
war against the Unbeliever. 

That night, during the usual banquet, Ali Ibn 
Hussein, of the robber Harith clan, and a number of 
other shereefs and sheiks stole up to Feisal and 
whispered: 

““‘We have the palace surrounded and are going to 
kill these Turkish dogs.” 

Realizing that his followers were in dead earnest, 
Feisal waved them aside for the moment and, turning 
to Djemal and Enver, said: 

“Now, gentlemen, according to our custom, after 


CULT OF BLOOD OF MOHAMMED 57 


a banquet of this kind, you must spend the night in 
my house.” 

Feisal then established his guests in his own room 
and slept outside the door all night. Without leav- 
ing them for a single moment, he took them to the 
train the next morning and accompanied them on 
their three-day journey to Damascus. This required 
no little nerve, for if Djemal and Enver had sus- 
pected that anything was wrong in Medina and that 
the Arabs did not intend to codperate with Turkey 
and Germany in the war, they would either have 
killed Feisal or held him as a hostage to guarantee 
the good behavior of his father. 

An Arabian banquet is an occasion to be remem- 
bered. After the war King Hussein entertained at 
the Belediyah, the town-hall of Jeddah, in honor of 
Prince Georges Lotfallah of Egypt. Rows and 
rows of small tables were placed end to end and then 
piled high with food until they groaned under the 
weight. Eighty guests were served at one sitting, 
and the waiters walked up and down on top of the 
tables, looking down at you. If your plate was not 
full they would slice off a slab of sheep or goat and 
then step over the cake and attend to your neighbor. 
After the first eighty had dined, the next sitting was 
served in like manner. 


CHAPTER V 


THE FALL OF JEDDAH AND MECCA 


\ N Y HEN the World War pulled Turkey into 
the maelstrom, with Great Britain, 
France, Russia, and Italy pitted against 

her, it was the hour of opportunity for Arabia. 

Unable to obtain sufficient funds and ammunition, 

Shereef Hussein was compelled to let many months 

pass by without declaring himself. Then came 

the news of the surrender of Kut el Amara by 

General Townsend. ‘This was a serious reverse for 

the Allies and an important victory for the Turks. 

Hussein could no longer hold his followers. He 

sent word to the British Government that he could 

not stand by and permit his people to remain sub- 
ject to the Turks. He asked for assistance, but be- 
fore receiving a reply, with all the pent-up fury and 
hatred of five hundred years of oppression and dis- 
honor, the Arabs of the Hedjaz leaped at the throats 
of the Turks. From all parts of the desert came 
the swarthy, lean, picturesque sons of Ishmael to 
avenge and free themselves at last. 

Hussein and his four sons had worked out all the 
details of their plan for the revolution, but kept them 


secret until a few weeks before they touched off the 
58 | 


FALL OF JEDDAH AND MECCA 39 


fuse. They did not even dare to trust their close as- 
sociates, because in Turkish territory plots were 
usually discovered before they matured, and no man 
knew whom he could trust. Not only were there 
spies but innumerable spies on spies. 

Karly in 1916, when Lieutenant Lawrence was 
making a reputation for himself with the Secret 
Corps in Cairo, Grand Shereef Hussein sent word to 
all the tribes of Holy Arabia to be ready at a mo- 
ment’s notice. Then, on June 9, he gave the signal. 
‘At the same instant he himself publicly denounced 
Enver, Talaat, Djemal, and their infamous Com- 
mittee of Unity and Progress. Simultaneous at- 
tacks were launched against Mecca, Jeddah, the sea- 
port to the holy city, and Medina, three of the least 
known and most interesting cities in the world. And 
before we continue to the point in the Arab Revolt 
where Lawrence made his entrance, let us stop and 
see these centers of life in the Hedjaz whence came so 
many of Lawrence’s associates. 


When you land at Jeddah you blink your eyes and 
pinch yourself to see if you are awake. The Koran 
forbids the use of intoxicating liquors, but either the 
architects who designed this city were not faithful 
Mussulmans or most of the buildings were con- 
structed before Mohammed introduced prohibition 
into Arabia. The streets of Jeddah are a bewil- 
dering maze of narrow zigzag cafhions between tall 
tottering houses, which look as though they had been 


60 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


joggled about by incessant earthquakes. Many of 
the houses are of five and six stories and are used only 
for the accommodation of pilgrims who pass through 
on their way to Mecca during Ramadan, a time when 
the population of the city increases from twenty 
thousand to perhaps one hundred thousand. The 
most fitting way I can think of describing this weird 
Arabian seaport is to say that it looks like any or- 
dinary Oriental city might look to a man suffering 
from delirium tremens. The Leaning Tower of Pisa 
would be in an appropriate setting if it were trans- 
ferred to Jeddah. Symmetry seems to be an un- 
known quantity in this part of the Near East. It is 
said that an Arab carpenter cannot draw a right 
angle, and an Arab waiter never puts a table-cloth on 
square. The sacred shrine of the Mohammedans in 
Mecca, known as the Kaaba, meaning “cube,” has 
none of its sides or angles equal. Arab streets are 
seldom parallel, and even “the street that is called 
straight” in Damascus is not straight! Jeddah, with 
its inebriated buildings, its crazy fragile balconies, its 
leaning minarets, its lazy Arab merchants squatting 
cross-legged on top of tables in front of chaotic shops, 
its fantastic arcaded bazaars covered in with patch- 
work roofs pieced together like the sails of a Chinese 
junk, is the nearest approach to a futurist paradise of 
any city in the world. 

Arabia is indeed a topsyturvy land. Where we 
measure most of our liquids and weigh most of our 
solids, they weigh their liquids and measure their 


FALL OF JEDDAH AND MECCA 61 


solids. Where we use knives and forks and spoons, 
they use their hands. Where we use tables and chairs 
they recline on the floor. Where we mount from the 
left, they mount their camels and horses from the 
right. We read from left to right, while they read 
from right to left. The desert-dweller keeps his 
head covered in the summer and winter alike, and his 
feet usually unprotected. Where we take off our 
hats in entering a friend’s house, they take off their 
shoes. 

In addition to its Arab population, Jeddah is in- 
habited by the remnants of a thousand pilgrimages, 
descendants of pilgrims who had sufficient money to 
enable them to reach Mecca but not enough to enable 
them to leave Arabia after fulfilling their religious 
vows. Many of them are poverty-stricken and 
barely able to eke out a living at the odd jobs which 
they get during the short pilgrimage season each 
year. Among them are Javanese, Filipinos, Malays, 
representatives of a dozen different Indian races, 
Kurds, Turks, Egyptians, Sudanese, Abyssinians, 
Senegalese, tribesmen from the Sahara, Zanzibaris, 
Yemenites, Somalis, and numerous others. 

One afternoon, accompanied by Major Goldie, an 
officer attached to the British mission which had its 
headquarters there during the campaign, I rode out 
through the Mecca gate to the Abyssinian quarter. 
The dwellings of these primitive people are round 
huts with conical thatched roofs, surrounded by high 
kraal fences made of rusty petrol and preserved-meat 


62 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


tins. We pulled up our ponies in front of a hut 
where a negro woman was busy tanning a hide. The 
moment she saw us she began screaming: “Oh, why 
have you come to destroy my home? Oh, why are 
you going to carry away my child? Oh! Oh! Oh! 
What have I done that you should want to shoot me?” 
Although Goldie did his best to reassure her, she con- 
tinued this wail until we rode out of hearing. 

On either side of Jeddah, a few miles distant, are 
small ports which foreigners scrupulously avoid visit- 
ing. Tourists have never been welcome because these 
villages for many years have been slave-trading cen- 
ters. Here negroes, smuggled across from the Af- 
rican coast, were sold to wealthy Arabs. The Turk- 
ish Government winked at this vicious commerce, but 
King Hussein is vigorously endeavoring to stamp it 
out. As a result of Hussein’s stand on the slavery 
question, the price of a well-built young negro has 
advanced from the pre-war quotation of £50 to £300 
or even as high as £500. Although the trade may 
continue surreptitiously for a short time, the king and 
his sons are so bitterly opposed to it that it is only a 
question of months until they will have driven it out. 

Beyond the north gate of the Jeddah wall Major 
Goldie took me to see what thousands of Moham- 
medans believe to be the tomb of the common ancestor > 
of us all. There is a century-old tradition to the ef- 
fect that it was here near Jeddah that the ark 
grounded after the Great Flood. According to one 
version of the story, on his six hundred and first birth- 


FALL OF JEDDAH AND MECCA 68 


day, not long after the waters had abated, Noah and 
his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, were walk- 
ing along the beach when they came to a depression 
in the sand. ‘This depression seemed to resemble a 
human form. It was about three hundred feet long. 
Ham asked his father what he thought it could be, 
and the venerable patriarch replied, ““Ham, my lad, 
that is the last resting-place of Mother Eve.” Of 
course there are many educated Mohammedans who 
Jaugh at this legend, but, nevertheless, a wall three 
hundred feet long has been built around the supposed 
depression, and within this inclosure is a white mosque 
where thousands of women worship every year. 
They believe Mother Eve was three hundred feet in 
height. Just think how the rest of us must have de- 
generated! But the city takes its name from this 
tomb, for the word “Jeddah” means grandmother or 
ancestress. | 

Since the time of Mohammed, no Jews, Christians, 
followers of Zoroaster, or other unbelievers, have been 
welcome anywhere in the Hedjaz except along the 
coast. None but the faithful are even allowed to 
go beyond the Jeddah wall through the east gate, 
which leads in the direction of Mecca. The British 
officers who were stationed in Jeddah from the out- 
break of the revolution until the end of the war 
scrupulously observed this unwritten law. During 
the campaign no Allied representatives ever visited 
the forbidden capital of the king of the Hedjaz—at 
any rate not officially or for publication. King Hus- 


64 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


sein even went so far as to request the British author- 
ities to instruct all officers piloting seaplanes attached 
to war-ships cruising in the Red Sea under no cir- 
cumstances to profane the air by flying over either 
Mecca or Medina. 

This very day millions of Moslems are turning 
their faces five times toward Mecca and declaring 
over and over again: 

“La ilaha Allah wa Muhammad-ar-rasul Allah! 
There is but one God, Allah, and Mohammed is His 
Prophet.” 

Mecca and Medina, its sister metropolis of the 
desert, are the two most mysterious cities in the world. 
Any man in the vicinity of either who declared that 
Christ was the son of God would be torn to pieces. 

Since the time of Mohammed, Mecca and Medina 
have been forbidden to all but Moslems. In fact, 
the fanatical followers of the founder of Islam would 
destroy any intruder whom they even suspected of 
being an unbeliever. For this reason all conferences 
between King Hussein and the representatives of the 
British and French Governments were held in 
Jeddah. 

We have a record of only a dozen or so Christians 
who have visited Mecca during the past one thousand 
years—and lived to tell the tale. The most cele- 
brated of these, of course, was Sir Richard Burton. 
Fewer still have visited Medina. At the end of the 
eighteenth century a puritanical and fanatical sect 
from Central Arabia called the Wahabis overran the 


FALL OF JEDDAH AND MECCA 65 


Hedjaz and captured Mecca. They were driven out 
by an Egyptian army under Mohammed Ali, and for 
a time an adventurer and ex-sergeant in the Black 
Watch had the unique honor of acting as governor 
of Medina and guardian of the tomb of the Prophet. 

Not only do all Mohammedans turn toward Mecca 
to pray, because it was the birthplace of their 
Prophet, but many of them build their houses, and 
even their outhouses, facing Mecca; and when they 
die they are buried facing Mecca. 

Mohammed enjoined his followers to make pil- 
grimages to Mecca. He advocated this in order to 
satisfy the pagans of Arabia, who had been doing it 
for centuries. The city has no economic importance, 
but the pilgrims who go there each year during the 
month of Zu el Hajz are a source of income to its 
one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. 

Tens of thousands of pilgrims visit Mecca an- 
nually, although for many who come from far-off 
lands two years are required to make the trip. 

The region about Mecca is all holy. Pilgrims are 
not permitted to disturb the wild animals nor even to 
cut the thorns or desert herbs. The holy city of 
Islam is located in a narrow pocket between the hills 
where two valleys join. Three forts frown down 
upon Mecca from the heights and were occupied by 
Turkish troops until King Hussein’s followers drove 
them out. 

In the center of Mecca is the Great Mosque, which 
was built as a place of pagan worship many centuries 


66 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


before the birth of Mohammed. It is known as the 
Mosque of the Kaaba or Masjid Al Haram, which 
means “the sacred temple.” Within the courtyard 
is a small cube-shaped building, the famous Kaaba. 
It is covered over with a gorgeous holy carpet of 
black silk with a wide border of gold lettering, texts 
from the Koran. The roof is supported by pillars of 
aloe wood. Around the edge is a spout of gold, 
which carries off rain-water. Embedded in one of 
the walls is the most sacred object in the world to 
more than two hundred millions of people. It is the 
black stone of meteoric origin which the Mohammed- 
ans believe was tossed down from heaven by the 
Angel Gabriel to Father Abraham. They say it was 
once whiter than milk but that it has been turned 
black by the sins of the people who have kissed it. 
Others say that it derived its color from Adam’s tears. 
It has been broken in seven pieces, and its parts are 
now held together by a background of cement sur- 
rounded by a silver band studded with silver nails. 
The followers of the Prophet believe that this cube- 
shaped building rests directly underneath the throne 
of God. ‘They say it was lowered down from heaven 
at the request of Adam and that it is an exact dupli- 
cate of one that he had seen in paradise before his 
expulsion, called Beit al Mamur, and frequented by 
angels. Very few people ever enter the Kaaba, but 
those who do keep their eyes down in an attitude of 
reverence and humble submission to divine power. 
If a pilgrim from Syria enters it, for the rest of his 


FALL OF JEDDAH AND MECCA 67 


life he never goes barefoot, because he believes that 
his skin has touched holy ground and therefore must 
never be placed on profane earth again. 

The holy carpet which covers the Kaaba is replaced 
each year by a new one. Formerly there were two 
sent each year, one of which came down from Damas- 
cus from the sultan of Turkey, while the other was 
made in Cairo and presented to the mosque by the 
sultan of Egypt. When a new one is put up, the old 
one is cut into bits by the pilgrims, who take the 
pieces home for souvenirs. 

According to tradition, from the dawn of creation 
to judgment day at least one pilgrim is always sup- 
posed to be engaged in walking seven times around 
the Kaaba. But about every twenty years great 
floods come and fill all the streets of Mecca, including 
the mosque, and when these floods occur men are 
hired to swim around it day and night in order that 
the ceremony may never be interrupted. 

The pilgrims kiss the black stone, run around the 
building seven times, take a drink from a holy well 
called Zem Zem, and kiss the stone again. Sir 
Richard Burton said that when he tried to kiss the 
black stone he found himself in a milling throng of 
religious devotees, each of whom was trying to force 
his way through the crowd in order that he might 
press his lips against the most sacred object in the 
world. He said that these religious enthusiasts were 
all calling out their prayers in loud voices, and be- 
tween sentences of their prayers they would stop and 


68 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


curse the man who was elbowing them away from the 
black stone. 

The most important well in Mecca is this well of 
Zem Zem in the courtyard of the mosque. The 
water in it is slightly brackish but is said to be delight- 
ful when one becomes accustomed to using it. The 
well is eight feet wide and quite deep. According 
to Moslem tradition one of the direct routes to heaven 
is through the bottom of this well. The pilgrims 
from India, who take such superstitions literally, fre- 
quently threw themselves into the well, making the 
water undrinkable for days. In fact, so many people 
tried the short cut to paradise that it became neces- 
sary to stretch a net over the bottom to break their 
fall. 

There is an ancient tradition among Mohammed- 
ans that the approach of the day of resurrection 
will be indicated by the sun rising in the west and 
by the appearance of a monster which will rise out of 
the earth in the courtyard of the Mas3id Al Haram. 
This beast is to be sixty cubits in height, just twice 
as high as the Lord commanded Noah to make the 
ark. It is to be a complex combination of eleven 
different animals, having the head of a bull, the eyes 
of a hog, the ears of an elephant, the horns of a stag, 
the neck of a giraffe, the breast of a lion, the color 
of a tiger, the back of a cat, the tail of a ram, the 
legs of a camel, and the voice of an ass. She is to 
bring with her the rod of Moses and the seal of Solo- 
mon. So swift will be this monster that none will 


FALL OF JEDDAH AND MECCA 69 


escape. With the rod of Moses she will smite all 
true believers on the cheek, branding them with a 
mark which will indicate that they are of the faithful. 
Unbelievers will be stamped with the seal of King 
Solomon. It is also believed that this strange beast 
will speak Arabic. After the appearance of this 
mammoth creature all mortals who have inhabited the 
earth since the dawn of creation will be required to 
cross a valley on a hair, from which the iniquitous 
will tumble off into the fires of hell, while the pure 
in heart will cross safely into paradise. There are 
many different versions of this tradition which were 
believed in by the adherents of other religions long 
before the time of Mohammed. 

Among other signs believed by some to be indica- 
tions of the approach of the day of resurrection are a 
war with the Turks; the advancement of the meanest 
to positions of dignity and power; the coming of 
Antichrist from Khorasan, mounted on an ass and 
followed by seventy thousand Jews; the return of 
Jesus, who certain Mohammedans believe will em- 
brace the Mohammedan religion, marry a wife, slay 
Antichrist, and rule the earth in peace and security; 
and the bestowal of the power of speech on all ani- 
mals, birds, fishes, reptiles, and inanimate things. 

Until recently Mecca was, perhaps, the most evil 
and licentious city in the world. “The holier the city, 
the wickeder its people,” runs the Arab proverb. A 
block away from the Holy Kaaba stands the slave- 

market, which was closed not long ago by Hussein. 


70 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


There were in the city of Mecca until recently, and 
perhaps still are, many women who are legally mar- 
ried and divorced almost monthly, and sometimes 
semi-monthly. A pilgrim arriving at Mecca, before 
King Hussein’s puritanical régime, could be legally 
married during the time he was a resident and per- 
forming his religious rites. He could then have his 
marriage legally dissolved when he left the city. 
The people of Mecca do not share those fine primitive 
virtues and simplicity of tastes which have made the 
Bedouins famous. Since olden times those born 
there have been distinguished from other Arabians by 
three scars on the cheek—a trade-mark of viciousness, 
say visitors to Mecca. 'The language of the Meccans 
is the most salacious to be found anywhere in the dis- 
solute East. ‘The city is filled with unspeakable dis- 
eases and practices. ‘Travelers have described scenes 
occurring in the Great Mosque as licentious as any 
reported to have occurred in the most dissolute days 
of ancient times. 


But to get back to our story of the capture of the 
holy cities by the Arabs, the aged Grand Shereef 
supervised the attack on Mecca, while Feisal and Ali 
were in command of the force directed against Me- 
dina. The Grand Shereef was successful at Mecca. 
The forts on the three hills overlooking that forbid- 
den and sacred city were garrisoned by the sultan’s 
most faithful Circassian mercenaries and by picked 
Turkish troops. On the day of the attack the Arabs 


FALL OF JEDDAH AND MECCA 71 


swept through the gates and captured the main ba- 
zaar, the residential section, the administration build- 
ings, and the sacred mosque of the Holy Kaaba. 
For a fortnight the battle raged around the two 
smaller forts, which were finally taken. During all 
this fighting the aged shereef remained in his palace 
directing operations in spite of scores of Turkish 
three-inch shells that riddled his residence. 

The Turks might have been able to hang on for 
many months had it not been for their own folly. 
The Ottoman seems to be a Mohammedan in theory 
only, occasionally adhering to the ritual, and even 
less frequently adhering to the spirit of the Koran. 
Heedless of the deep-set religious feelings of their 
enemies and coreligionists, they suddenly began to 
bombard the mosque of the Kaaba, the most sacred 
shrine of all Islam. One shell actually struck the 
black stone, burning a hole in the holy carpet and 
killing nine Arabs who were kneeling in prayer. 
Hussein’s followers were so enraged by this impious 
act that they swarmed over the walls of the great fort 
and captured it after desperate hand-to-hand fighting 
with knives and daggers. 

Both Mecca and the near-by seaport of Jeddah 
were captured during the first month’s fighting. 
Jeddah was taken in five days as a result of the co- 
operation of five small British merchantmen under 
Captain Boyle, a daring red-headed Irishman, who 
was second in command to Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, 
then admiral of the Near Eastern Fleet. 


72 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


More than a thousand Turkish and German pris- 
oners were taken at Jeddah. The bombardment of 
this port of entry to the holy city of Mecca nearly 
started a revolution in India. The eighty million 
Mohammedans living in India are the most fanatical 
of all Islam in many respects. They erroneously 
charged the British with having bombarded one of 
their holy places. As a matter of fact, Jeddah, be- 
ing merely the port to Mecca, has never been re- 
garded as a holy city by the Arabs themselves and is 
the one city in the Hedjaz to which unbelievers have 
always been admitted. 

At Medina the Bedouins, under Shereefs Feisal 
and Ali, were less successful. The tribesmen in 
northern Hedjaz, who had rallied round the She- 
reefian flag, swept out of the desert mists early on 
the same morning in June on which the attack was 
launched against Mecca. Occupying all the palm- 
groves which extend for miles around the outskirts, 
they drove the Turkish outposts from the gardens of 
the Medina palaces, fabled for their sparkling foun- 
tains, apricot, banana, and pomegranate orchards. 
The troops of the garrison withdrew inside the city 
walls. There they knew they had the additional pro- 
tection afforded by the Tomb of Mohammed, the 
tomb which causes Medina to be regarded as the sec- 
ond holiest city of Islam. Although Feisal and Ali 
could have brought up cannon from Jeddah and per- 
haps taken the city by storm after a bombardment, 
Hussein refused to permit this for fear of causing the 


FALL OF JEDDAH AND MECCA 73 


destruction of the Prophet’s tomb, a catastrophe 
which would have incurred the anger of every one of 
the two hundred and fifty million Mohammedans in 
the world. 

Medina is the city to which Mohammed made his 
hegira or flight from Mecca in July, 622 A. p., to save 
himself from the daggers of assassins hired by his re- 
ligious enemies. All Mohammedans count time not 
from the birth of Christ but from the date of that 
flight. Mohammed was buried in Medina, and on 
one side of him rests his favorite daughter, Fatima, 
and on the other side the second of the great Arabian 
rulers, Calif Omar. But between the graves of Mo- 
hammed and Omar a space was left, so the Moslem’s 
say, that Christ upon His second coming and death 
may be buried by the side of the Prophet. So Me- 
dina, in addition to being a city of considerable com: 
mercial importance, is a great pilgrimage center. 

Shortly after the war, the Turks, in order to fa- 
cilitate the movement of troops to quell possible up- 
risings in Arabia, but ostensibly to make it easier for 
pilgrims to reach Medina from the north, built a 
single-track railway line all the way down from Da- 
mascus. One of the first acts that the attacking 
Bedouin hordes committed when they approached 
Medina was to tear up several miles of rails with 
their bare hands, in order to isolate the garrison. Af- 
ter surrounding the town the Arabs sat down to 
await its surrender; but the Turks, encouraged by 
their inactivity, slipped out of the gates at dawn, 


74 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


surprised some of the Arabs who were camping in the 
suburb of Awali, and set fire to all the houses. 
Large numbers of women and children were shot 
down by machine-guns, and scores of others were 
burned alive in their homes. This so enraged the 
Bedouins and the thousands of Arab townsmen who 
came out of Medina to join Feisal and Ali that they 
immediately assaulted the great Turkish fort just 
outside the walls of the city. But the Turks opened 
fire with their heavy artillery and mowed great gaps 
in the tightly packed whirling mass of frenzied 
Arabians. Never having encountered artillery fire 
before in their lives, the frenzy soon turned to panic, 
and the mob fled to the shelter of a near-by hill. See- 
ing this, the Turkish commander sent out a force of 
picked men to cut them to pieces. Shereef Feisal 
saw the plight of his men and dashed up on his horse, 
utterly regardless of the bursting shrapnel and 
machine-gun fire from the fort which raked the in- 
tervening open ground. ‘The Bedouins whom he had 
brought up to help him rescue the broken and panic- 
stricken forces that had made the original attack on 
the fort held back, reluctant to face the enemy fire 
that formed such a deadly barrage between them and 
their comrades. But Feisal laughed and rode on 
alone. To give his followers confidence he even made 
his horse walk across the open space. Unwilling to 
be put to shame by their fearless commander, the 
relieving force gave a wild desert cry and charged, 
the name of Allah on the lips of every warrior. The 





A MUEZZIN CALLING THE FAITHFUL TO PRAYER 


HOHLOV AHL GNV AONHUAVT TANOTIOO 





FALL OF JEDDAH AND MECCA 7% 


two forces then combined and made a second attempt 
to storm the fort. Their ammunition was nearly ex- 
hausted. Night, which comes in Arabia with a sud- 
denness suggestive of an electrician switching off the 
sun’s light, dropped down like a black curtain just in 
time to save them from annihilation. On the mor- 
row, Feisal and Ali called all the tribal chieftains to 
a conference at their pavilion, and it was agreed that 
for the present it was futile to continue the attack; 
so they retired into the hills fifty miles to the south 
and camped astride the pilgrim road to prevent any 
Turkish forces from attempting to retake Mecca. 
The Turks at once repaired the railway line connect- 
ing them with Damascus, drove the thirty thousand 
civilian Arabs living in Medina out into the desert, 
brought down reinforcements from Syria, and fort- 
ified the city to resist all future attacks. After the 
war refugees from Medina were found all over the 
Turkish Empire, in Jerusalem, Konia, Damascus, 
Aleppo, and Constantinople. 

The Arabs, however, were still in undisputed pos- 
session of Mecca; and with the possible exception of 
the capture of Jerusalem and, later on, the combined 
capture of Damascus, Beyrouth, and Aleppo by 
Allenby’s army and the Arabs, the fall of Mecca is 
sure to rank in history as one of the greatest disasters 
ever suffered by the descendants of Othman. To her 
control of the holy city of Mecca Turkey largely 
owed her leadership of the Mohammedan peoples of 
the world. 


76 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Then came a long pause. ‘The Arabs were unable 
to go on with their revolution because they had ex- 
pended all their ammunition. Shereef Hussein 
again appealed to the Allies, and the British re- 
sponded. At that critical moment young Lawrence 
appeared on the Arabian stage. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE GATHERING OF THE DESERT TRIBES 


Oe under the red tape of army regula- 


tions, certain slight differences had arisen be- 
tween the chiefs at G.H.Q. and independent 
young Lawrence. His aversion to saluting superiors, 
for instance, and his general indifference to all tra- 
ditional military formalities did not exactly increase 
his popularity with some of the sterner warriors of the 
old school. In the Arab uprising Lawrence saw an 
avenue of escape from his Cairo strait-jacket. 
Ronald Storrs, then Oriental secretary to the high 
commissioner of Egypt, was ordered to make a trip 
down the Red Sea to Jeddah, with messages to Emir 
Hussein, instigator of the Mecca revolt. Although 
he had played no part in starting the Hedjaz revolu- 
tion, Lawrence had long realized the possibility of 
the Arabs’ helping prick the kaiser’s imperialistic 
bubble; so he asked permission to take a fortnight’s 
vacation, and he has been on that leave of absence ever 
since! 
Some of his superiors at the Savoy Hotel in Cairo 
were delighted at the prospect of getting rid of this 
altogether too obstreperous upstart “shavetail’” lieu- 


tenant, and his request was granted with alacrity. 
17 


78 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


But Lawrence, contrary to the custom of war-worn 
veterans on leave, did not go sailing down the Nile to 
the races at Alexandria, or up-stream to Luxor to 
while away his holiday at the Winter Palace. In- 
stead, he accompanied Ronald Storrs down the Red 
Sea. On arrival at Jeddah, Lawrence succeeded in 
getting permission from Grand Shereef Hussein to 
make a short camel journey inland to the camp of 
Emir Feisal, third son of the Grand Shereef, who was 
attempting to keep the fires of revolution alive. The 
Arab cause looked hopeless. 'There were not enough 
bullets left to keep the army in gazelle meat, and the 
troops were reduced to John the Baptist’s melancholy 
desert fare of locusts and wild honey. After ex- 
changing the usual Oriental compliments over many 
sweetened cups of Arabian coffee, the first question 
Lawrence asked Feisal was, “When will your army 
reach Damascus?” 

The question evidently nonplussed the emir, who 
gazed gloomily through the tent-flap at the bedrag- 
gled remnants of his father’s army. “In sh’Allah,” 
replied Feisal, stroking his beard. “There is neither 
power nor might save in Allah, the high, the tremen- 
dous! May He look with favor upon our cause. But 
I fear the gates of Damascus are farther beyond our 
reach at present than the gates of Paradise. Allah 
willing, our next step will be an attack on the Turk- 
ish garrison at Medina, where we hope to deliver the 
tomb of the Prophet from our enemies.” 

A few days with Emir Feisal convinced Lawrence 


GATHERING OF DESERT TRIBES 79 


that it might be possible to reorganize this rabble into 
an irregular force which might be of assistance to the 
British army in Egypt and Sinai. So absorbed did 
he become in working out this idea that when his two 
weeks’ furlough came to an end he stayed on in 
Arabia without even sending apologies to Cairo. 
From then onward Lawrence was the moving spirit 
in the Arabian revolution. 

When Lieutenant Lawrence arrived the situation 
was critical. ‘The Turks had rushed an army corps 
down from Syria to strengthen Medina, and they had 
sent down mule and camel transport, armored cars, 
aéroplanes, cavalry, and more artillery with which to 
stamp out the revolution. An expeditionary force 
from Medina was already on its way south, to recover 
Mecca and hang the rebel leaders higher than Haman. 
To be sure, this advancing army had two hundred and 
fifty miles of desert to cross, but they would have 
crossed it had not strange events occurred causing 
them hurriedly to revise their plans. As the Arab 
chroniclers recount: “The hosts of Othman, the 
minions of the usurper califs, advanced defiantly. 
But God was not with them! Praise be to Allah, the 
protector of all those who trust in him!” 

Lawrence had no definite plan but the thought 
was in his mind to devise a way of harassing the Turk 
and attracting the attention of a portion of the Otto- 
man forces opposing the British to the north in Sinai. 
He had startled Feisal with the remark that he be- 
lieved his troops would be in Damascus within two 


80 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


years. “If Allah wills,” had replied the emir with a 
dubious smile, as he stroked his beard and gazed at 
his riffraff army lolling in the shade of the date- 
palms. But something in Lawrence’s quiet manner 
impressed him with confidence, and he accepted the 
offer to codperation. To the young archeologist 
turned soldier the thought of participating in a desert 
war appealed greatly. Here he saw an opportunity 
not only of beating the Germans but of testing the 
theories of the great military experts whose books had 
so fascinated him. 

Once he had made up his mind to help the Arabs, 
Lawrence was immediately transformed from a 
scholarly student of the metaphysical and philosoph- 
ical side of war to a student of the stern realities of 
war. ‘To reach Mecca he thought the Turkish ex- 
pedition would first attempt to drive Feisal’s force 
out of the hills in order to capture Rabegh, the tiny 
but strategically important Red Sea port one hun- 
dred miles north of Jeddah. Here, behind coral- 
reefs, under a picturesque grove of palm-trees, were 
excellent wells. Lawrence’s first plan was to supply 
the Bedouin irregulars in the hills between Medina 
and Rabegh with modern rifles and plenty of ammu- 
nition, in the hope that they would be able to hold up 
the advancing Turks in the narrow defiles, until a 
regular army of Arab townsmen, more amenable to 
discipline, could be whipped into shape. Next, he 
planned to intrench them outside Rabegh, where they 
could codperate with the British fleet and give battle 


GATHERING OF DESERT TRIBES 81 


to the enemy when the latter finally broke through 
the hills. The Turks, however, upset this scheme 
with alarming speed. Much sooner than anticipated, 
and without warning, they pushed straight through 
the hills as though the Bedouin irregulars were not 
there. The situation now was even more precarious 
than when Lawrence first arrived. It seemed to the 
Arabs as though “the Maker of the Sun and Moon 
and Stars were guiding the destiny of the enemy.” 

It was at this stage in the campaign that Lawrence 
decided to disregard Foch’s dictum, that the object 
of modern war is to locate the enemy army and an- 
nihilate it. He came to the conclusion that to win a 
war against the Turks, or any other well-trained 
troops in the desert, it would be better to imitate the 
tactics of Hannibal and other military leaders of 
_pre-Napoleonic wars. He realized that in a stand-up 
fight against the better disciplined Turks the Arabs 
would be doomed. On the other hand, he figured 
that if Hussein’s followers confined themselves ex- 
clusively to the hit-and-run type of guerrilla warfare, 
to which they were so thoroughly accustomed, the 
Turks would be helpless to retaliate. The failure of 
his first plan opened Lawrence’s eyes, and the situa- 
tion as he now saw it resolved itself to this: 

Shereef Hussein’s followers had captured Mecca, 
the most important city of the Hedjaz. They had 
also taken Taif and Jeddah, and had swept the hated 
Turk from the whole of their country, with the ex- 
ception of the city of Medina and the fortified posts 


82 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


protecting the Hedjaz Railway, connecting Medina 
with Damascus. In other words, the Arabs were al- 
ready in possession of all of their country with the 
exception of a very small part. Furthermore, the 
Turkish garrisons at Medina and along the Hedjaz 
Railway could not move easily from their base with- 
out the consent of the Arabs, for they were sur- 
rounded by that mysterious element to which they 
were not accustomed, the unknown and unfathomable 
desert. An army corps of Turkish infantry would 
be as helpless in the desert as they would be at sea. 
On the other hand, the Arabs were at home among 
the shifting dunes. When a Bedouin tribe starts off 
on a raid, each man and his camel are a separate unit, 
each desert warrior as independent as a war-ship at 
sea; there are no lines of communication. Mounted 
on his racing-camel, a Bedouin can cruise across the 
desert sands for weeks without returning to his base 
of supplies. The dictum of a Bedouin strategist is 
quite contradictory to the dictum of Marshal Foch. 
His theory is not to hunt out his enemy and fight it out 
to the finish, but to stalk his prey as a hunter stalks 
his game. At an unguarded moment he sweeps 
down upon him, accomplishes his mission, and then, 
before his opponent has time to collect his wits, he 
vanishes, swallowed up by the trackless sands. This 
was the game Lawrence decided to play for all it 
might be worth. 

When he came to this decision, he was lying in his 
tent stricken with a fever, and the Turkish expedi- 


GATHERING OF DESERT TRIBES 83 


tionary force was bearing rapidly down upon Ra- 
begh. Instead of strengthening the system of 
trenches around the port and awaiting them, Law- 
rence and Feisal started north, leaving Shereef Hus- 
sein’s youngest son Zeid with a small band of 
Bedouins to harass the enemy. This left Jeddah and 
Mecca practically unprotected and gave the Turkish 
army a clear right of way. 

What was Lawrence’s scheme? 

To the north were two small ports, Yenbo and El 
Wejh. These were still held by the Turks as a pro- 
tection for the Hedjaz Railway, the life-cord both of 
the Medina garrison and of the Turkish army march- 
ing south on Mecca. His plan was to capture both 
of these important posts, threaten the railway, and 
compel the enemy expeditionary force to return to 
Medina or run the risk of being cut off in the desert 
without supplies. The more Lawrence thought 
about this the more he became convinced that if the 
Turkish expedition could be drawn back to Medina 
the Arab war would be won; at any rate, won so far 
as the liberation of the Hedjaz was concerned. He 
estimated that there were about one hundred and fifty 
thousand square miles of territory in the country and 
that if the Turks wanted completely to subjugate it 
and to stamp out all revolution they would need at 
least half a million soldiers. Since they had a max- 
imum of only one hundred thousand troops for the 
purpose, Lawrence concluded that if he could succeed 
in welding the scattered inhabitants of the desert into 


84 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


an army he might be able not only to drive the Turks 
from Holy Arabia but to invade Syria as well. To 
do this he must convince them that they should give 
up cutting each other’s throats over century-old tribal 
disputes. He must convince them that, instead, they 
must risk their lives for the freedom of their country 
and that they should die willingly for the liberation 
of the whole Arab world from Ottoman oppression. 

The General Staff at headquarters in Cairo raised 
no objection to Lawrence’s remaining in Arabia when 
he failed to return at the end of his furlough. Gen- 
eral Sir Gilbert Clayton, head of the Intelligence 
Corps, knew that he could speak the language, that 
he understood the people, and, indeed, that he was 
something of a Bedouin at heart himself. G. H. Q. 
merely hoped that he might encourage the Arabs a 
little and help keep the rebellion alive. They gave him 
complete freedom of action in order that he might 
make the most of any opportunities that might arise. 
That was in October, 1916, and by October, 1918, 
this youngster, not yet out of his twenties, had raised 
a formidable vaporous irregular army and had led it 
through the gates of Damascus. 

It was by the process of accretion that Lawrence 
and Feisal built up their army. With only two com- 
panions the former started out across the desert. He 
stopped at every nomad encampment, and, calling the 
head men together, in faultless classic Arabic he ex- 
plained his mission. The fact that Lawrence was 
visiting them in the name of Sidi Feisal, the most be- 


GATHERING OF DESERT TRIBES 85 


loved of Shereef Hussein’s sons, insured him against 
personal harm, in spite of the fact that he was a Chris- 
tian trespassing on sacred ground. At nightfall, af- 
ter prayers, he would sit by the camp-fires before the 
black tents, discussing with his Bedouin hosts the past 
greatness of Arabia and her present condition of 
servitude, until he had every member of the tribe 
worked up to a high pitch of frenzy. Over roasted 
goat killed in his honor, and cups of sweetened tea, 
in phrases more eloquent than the words of the tribal 
wise men, he would discuss with them the possibility 
of driving out the Turks. He convinced them that 
they would be flying in the face of Allah if they 
hesitated longer, since their ancient enemy was at the 
moment too busy fighting the British, French, [tal- 
ians, and Russians to offer serious resistance to an 
Arab uprising. ‘That he succeeded in persuading 
the Bedouins to renounce their blood-feuds and unite 
against their common enemy was demonstrated by 
the fact that within six months he had united nearly 
all of the tribes of the Hedjaz into a loose alliance. 
The first three tribes won over were the Harb, who 
inhabit the desert between Medina and Mecca; the 
Juheina, who dwell in the region between the Red Sea 
coast and Medina; and the people of the Billi tribe, 
who roam the country east of El Wejh. The first 
of these includes over two hundred thousand people 
and is one of the largest tribes in all Arabia. 
Throughout the entire first phase of the desert 
campaign the Arabs were given invaluable assistance 


86 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


by the British navy. While Lawrence trekked north 
through the interior encouraging and supervising the 
gathering of the clans, Feisal left the Mecca road un- 
defended and started up the coast accompanied by 
every man available, except the few snipers who re- 
mained with Shereef Zeid. By the time Feisal had 
advanced within striking distance of Yenbo, the first 
port north of Rabegh, Lawrence had sent several 
thousand more tribesmen to his support. The Turk- 
ish garrison evacuated before the Arabs arrived, the 
guns of the British war-ships causing them to take to 
their heels. ‘The entry into Yenbo was splendid and 
barbaric. Emir Feisal, as commander-in-chief of 
the Arabian army, rode in front, dressed in robes as 
white as the snows of Lebanon. On his right rode 
another shereef, garbed in dark red, his head-cloth, 
tunic, and cloak dyed with henna. On Feisal’s left 
rode “Shereef’? Lawrence, in pure white robes, look- 
ing like the reincarnation of a prophet of old. Be- 
hind them were Bedouins carrying three large ban- 
ners of purple silk, topped with gold spikes, and 
followed by a minstrel twanging a lute and three 
drummers playing a weird march. After them came 
a bouncing, billowy mass of thousands of wild sons of 
Ishmael, on camels, all members of Feisal’s and Law- 
rence’s body-guard. 'They were packed together in 
a dense throng as they passed down the corridor of 
palm-trees, under the minarets of the mosque. ‘The 
riders were wearing robes of every color, and from 
their saddles hung gay trappings and rich brocades. 


GATHERING OF DESERT TRIBES 87 


It was indeed a resplendent cavalcade. All were 
singing at the tops of their nasal voices, improvising 
verses descriptive of the virtues of Emir Feisal and 
his fair-haired “grand vizier.” 

From Yenbo they at once pushed on north along 
the coast, for another two hundred miles toward El 
Wejh, which was held by a thousand Turkish troops. 
The name of this port recalls to mind another expe- 
dition. About 24 B.c. Augustus Cesar sent Allius 
Gallus to Arabia with eleven thousand of the picked 
soldiers of Rome. After wandering for six months 
through the thirst-stricken land they finally gave up 
their attempt to reach the frankincense country, and 
when they sailed back to Egypt from this same port 
of El Wejh there was but a sorry remnant left. 
They had learned to their grief what Lawrence al- 
ready knew, that an army in Arabia must be able to 
endure much and live on little. By now Lawrence 
and Feisal had collected ten thousand men, and this 
force was divided into nine sections. ‘They con- 
verged at the village of Um Lejj, about half-way. 
There they received fresh supplies from the British 
war-ships, with whom perfect liaison was maintained 
throughout the entire coastal operations. From Um 
Lejj on the north, one hundred and twenty miles of 
waterless desert lay before the Arab army. So 
barren was this region that there were not even thorns 
on which the camels might subsist. But an armed 
merchantman of the Indian merchant marine fol- 
lowed up the coast, ran the risk of ripping wide her 


88 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


hull on hidden coral reefs, and put into an uncharted 
bay with a small quantity of water for the mules but 
none for the camels. Hundreds of the latter were 
lost, but the army reached the hills overlooking El] 
Wejh on January 25, 1917, without the loss of a 
single man from hunger or thirst. 

El Wejh stands at the southwestern corner of a 
small coraline plateau, bounded on the west by the 
sea, on the south by a dry wadi, and on the east by 
an inland plain. The British war-ships bombarded 
the Turks out of their main fortress by firing from 
fourteen thousand yards, which enabled them to keep 
far outside the range of the Turkish guns. ‘After 
shelling them for a few hours, a landing-party of 
Arabs, who had been carried up by sea for the pur- 
pose, went ashore and attacked the demoralized gar- 
rison. At the same time, Lawrence and his men 
swept in from the desert and took a hand both in the 
street fighting and the looting. True to tradition, 
Lawrence’s Bedouins made off with every movable 
object in Kl Wejh. 

Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss directed the sea at- 
tack in person. To use the Arab phrase, Admiral 
Wemyss was the “father and mother” of the Arabian 
revolution during its early stages. Much of the 
cerdit for the early successes of the Arabs should go to 
him. Whenever Lawrence wanted to stage a cinema 
show, as he described demonstrations made to impress 
the rather restive Arabs, who were too much inclined 
to revert to their old habit of fighting among them- 


GATHERING OF DESERT TRIBES 89 


selves, he would simply notify the admiral, who would 
steam down from Suez in his huge flag-ship, the 
Euryalus, and engage in target-practice with his 
nine-inch guns along the coast within sight of the 
Shereefian army. On two occasions the admiral an- 
chored the Euryalus in Jeddah Harbor at critical 
moments, ostensibly to present his compliments to 
the Grand Shereef. There is no doubt that the mam- 
moth size of the admiral’s flag-ship was largely 
responsible for the impression which the aged mon- 
arch gained of Britain’s power. 

“She is the great sea in which I, the fish, swim,” 
he remarked on one occasion. “And the larger the 
sea the fatter the fish!” 


CHAPTER VII 
THE BATTLE AT THE WELLS OF ABU EL LISSAL 


IMULTANEOUSLY with Feisal’s attack on 
the small Red Sea ports of Yenbo and El 
Weyjh, his brother Abdulla appeared out of 
the desert several miles to the east, near Medina. He 
was accompanied by a riding-party mounted on she 
racing-camels. ‘These raiders wiped out a few enemy 
patrols, blew up several sections of track, and left a 
formal letter tacked, in full view, on one of the 
sleepers, and addressed to the Turkish commander- 
in-chief, describing in redundant and lurid detail 
what his fate would be if he lingered longer in Arabia. 
The Turkish forces advancing on Mecca received 
news of the fall of Yenbo and El Wejh, more than a 
hundred miles to the northwest of them, and of 
Shereef Abdulla’s raids a hundred miles to the north- 
east, at almost the same moment. ‘They were amazed 
and bewildered, for a few days previously the Arab 
army had been sitting in front of them at Rabegh. 
Thanks to the sniping of Emir Zeid’s handful of 
followers by day and to small raids by night, the 
Turks had been tricked into thinking the main Hed- 
jaz army still there, but now there appeared to be 


‘Arab armies on all sides of them. ‘The relentless rays 
90 


THE BATTLE AT THE WELLS 93 


of the sun, beating down with blistering ferocity on 
the parched region where they encamped, not only 
increased their thirst but stimulated their imagination 
as well. ‘To their feverish, sunken eyes, every mirage 
now seemed to be a cloud of Bedouin horsemen. 
Each hour brought camel couriers with news of raids 
on Kl Ula, Medain Saleh, and other stations north 
of Medina and of the capture of two more of their 
Red Sea garrisons at Dhaba and Moweilah. 
Thoroughly frightened by the news of these unex- 
pected reverses, as well as by the rumors of fictitious 
Arab victories circulated purposely among them by 
Lawrence’s secret agents, the Turks, panic-striken, 
fled back to defend their base at Medina and to de- 
fend the railway, which was their sole line of com- 
munication with Syria and Turkey. 

In the north of Holy Arabia, near the head of the 
Gulf of Akaba, the Turks had another garrison far 
more important than any as yet taken in the cam- 
paign except the garrisons at Mecca and Jeddah. 
Before Feisal’s followers could hope to sweep their 
ancient enemy out of all the Hedjaz, excepting 
Medina, this important stronghold at the head of 
the gulf must be accounted for. This accomplished, 
Lawrence had in mind a far bolder and vaster plan 
which he hoped to execute. 

Of all the strategic places along the west coast of 
Arabia north of Aden, the most important from a 
military standpoint is the ancient seaport of Akaba, 
once the chief naval base of King Solomon’s fleet, and 


92 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


also one of the first places where the Prophet 
Mohammed preached and made his headquarters. 
For any army attempting to invade Egypt or strike 
at the Suez Canal from the east, Akaba must be the 
left flank, as it must be the right flank for any army 
setting out from Egypt to invade Palestine and Syria. 
From the beginning of the war the Turks had main- 
tained a large garrison there, both because they 
intended to wrest Egypt from the British, and be- 
cause it was essential to the security of the Hedjaz 
Railway. 

It was Lawrence’s intention to capture Akaba and 
make it the base for an Arab invasion of Syria! This 
was a truly ambitious and portentous plan. 

On June 18, 1917, with only eight hundred 
Bedouins of the Toweiha tribe, two hundred of the 
Sherart, and ninety of the Kawachiba, he set out 
from El Wejh for the head of the Gulf of Akaba, 
three hundred miles farther north. This force was 
headed by Shereef Nasir, a remote descendant of 
Mohammed and one of Feisal’s ablest lieutenants. 
As usual, Lawrence went along to advise the Arab 
commander; he always made it a point to act through 
one of the native leaders, and much of his success 
may be attributed to his tact in making the Arabs be- 
lieve that they were conducting the campaign them- 
selves. 

The advance on Akaba is an illustration of how 
ably Lawrence handled Feisal’s army, in spite of his 
complete Jack of military trainmg and experience. 


THE BATTLE AT THE WELLS 93 


In order to outwit the Turkish commander at Medina 
he led a flying column nearly one thousand miles to 
the north of El Wejh; but instead of going right up 
the coast toward Akaba, he led them far into the 
interior, across the Hedjaz Railway not far from 
Medina, where they blew up several miles of track on 
the way, then through the Wadi Sirhan, famous for 
its venomous reptiles, where some of his men died of 
snake-bite, then across the territory of the Howeitat: 
tribe east of the Dead Sea, and still on, north into the 
land of Moab. He even led a party of picked men 
through the Turkish lines by night, dynamited a 
train near Amman ( the ancient Greek city of Phil- 
adelphia), blew up a bridge near Deraa, the most im- 
portant railway junction just south of Damascus, 
and mined another several hundred miles behind the ~ 
Turkish front-line trenches, near the Syrian indus- 
trial city of Homs. 

It was possible for Lawrence to conduct raids on 
such a grand scale only because of the extraordinary 
mobility of his forces. With his camel corps he could 
cruise across the desert for six weeks without return- 
ing to his supply base. As long as the members of 
his party kept to the desert and out of sight of the 
Turkish fortified posts along the frontiers of Pales- 
tine and Syria, they were as safe as though they were 
on another planet. When they saw an opportunity to 
dash in and make a surprise attack, they would do 
so, and then dash back into the desert where the 
Turks dared not follow because they neither had the 


94 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


camels, the intimate knowledge of the desert, nor the 
phenomenal powers of endurance which the Bedouins 
possessed. During a six weeks’ expedition, Law- 
rence’s followers would live on nothing but un- 
leavened bread. Each man carried a half-sack of 
flour weighing forty-five pounds, enough to enable 
him to trek two thousand miles without obtaining 
fresh supplies. They could get along comfortably 
on a mouthful of water a day when on the march, but 
wells were rarely more than two or three days’ march 
apart, so that they seldom suffered from thirst. 

For these expeditions, far to the north and within 
territory occupied by the Turks, Lawrence divided 
his men into several different raiding-parties, in or- 
der to confuse and bewilder the enemy. After an- 
noying them in the hills of Moab, to the east of 
Jericho, and then a day or two later away up around 
Damascus, he swept south again. It is sixty miles 
from Akaba to the Hedjaz Railway; and in order to 
prevent the Turks from guessing that Akaba was his 
real objective, he made a feint against Maan, the most 
important fortified town on the railway between 
Medina and the Dead Sea. At the same time, seven- 
teen miles southwest of Maan, he swooped down 
upon Fuweilah station and wiped out its garrison. 
When news of this reached the Turks at Maan they 
despatched one of their crack mounted regiments 
in pursuit, but when the regiment reached the station 
only the vultures were found in possession; Lawrence 
and his raiders had disappeared into the blue again 


THE BATTLE AT THE WELLS 95 


and, so far as the Turks knew, had been swallowed up 
by the desert. But, lest they should be forgotten, on 
the evening of the following day they reappeared out 
of the mist many miles distant. There they merrily 
planted more mines, demolished a mile of track, and 
destroyed a relief train. ‘The heat during these July 
days was intense. In describing it, Lawrence re- 
marked that the burning ground seared the skin from 
the forearms of the snipers, and the camels went as 
Jame as the men did, with agony from the sunburned 
flints. | 

By this time Lawrence and Shereef Nasir had 
been joined by the Beni Atiyeh tribe, who supplied 
them with four thousand fresh fighting men, and also 
by the Abu Tayi section of the Howeitat tribe, made 
up of some of the finest warriors in Arabia, under the 
leadership of Auda, a veritable human tiger who was 
Lawrence’s intimate companion from then onward. 

The pursuing Turkish column decided to spend the 
night in the bottom of a valley near some wells at 
Abu el Lissal, fourteen miles from Maan, where I 
camped with Lawrence and Feisal some months later. 
Lawrence, in the meantime, left his column and gal- 
loped off across the desert, to see if he could locate 
the Turkish battalion. As soon as he found it he 
hurried back for his men, brought them on to the 
heights around Abu el Lissal, and by dawn had the 
Turks completely surrounded. 

For twelve hours the Arabs sniped at the Turks 
from their positions on the hills around the wells, 


96 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


picking off many of them. The sultan’s forces were 
indeed in a tight corner, but Lawrence knew full well 
that if they were under capable and daring leaders 
they could easily fight their way out through his thin 
line of Bedouins. The Turk commander, however, 
lacked the necessary courage. So at sunset Auda 
Abu Tayi, with fifty of his fellow-tribesmen, crept up 
to within three hundred yards of the Turks and after 
a moment’s rest boldly pushed out from under cover 
and galloped straight into the enemy camp. So sur- 
prised were the Turks by this audacity that when the 
old Bedouin chieftain crashed into their midst their 
ranks broke, but not before bullets had smashed Auda 
Abu Tayi’s field-glasses, pierced his revolver-holster, 
nicked the sword he was holding in his hand, and 
killed two horses under him. In spite of these inci- 
dents the old Arab was delighted and maintained 
afterward that it was the best scrap he had had since 
Ramadan. 

Lawrence, who was watching from the hill on the 
opposite side of the basin, dashed down the slope as 
fast as his dromedary could carry him and charged 
into the midst of the now demoralized Turks, fol- 
lowed by four hundred other Bedouins on camels. 
For twenty minutes a thousand Turks and Arabs 
were mixed together in a wild, frenzied mass, all 
shooting madly. In the charge Lawrence acci- 
dentally shot his own camel through the head with his 
automatic; it dropped dead, and he was hurled from 
his saddle and lay stunned in front of it, while his 


THE BATTLE AT THE WELLS 97 


followers charged right over him. Had he not been 
thrown directly in front of his mount he would have 
been trampled to death by the onrushing camels. 

The Turks made their fatal error in scattering, just 
as Lawrence had surmised they would do, and the 
battle ended in massacre. Although many escaped in 
the darkness, the Arabs killed and captured more 
than the total number of their own force. The next 
morning more than three hundred dead were counted 
around the water-hole. Most of the prisoners taken 
were rounded up by Shereef Nasir and Lawrence, be- 
cause the rest of the Bedouins dashed off to the Turk- 
ish tents, as usual thinking of nothing but loot. The 
desire to loot is an all-consuming passion with the 
Bedouins and is not considered a form of stealing by 
them but is listed among the cardinal virtues. 

So bitter were the Arabs that they wanted to kill 
their prisoners in retaliation for the atrocities the 
Turks had been committing against their women and 
children. They were also aching to avenge the death 
of Sheik Belgawiya of Kerak, one of their leaders, 
whom the Turks had harnessed between four mules 
and torn apart limb from limb. The sheik’s tragic 
death had been the climax of a series of executions by 
torture which had so enraged the Arabs that they 
swore never to give quarter to another Turk. But 
Lawrence had other ideas. He wanted the rumor 
spread far and wide through the Turkish army that 
the Arabs were not only accepting prisoners but were 
treating them well, and so he finally prevailed upon 


98 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


his revengeful followers to treat these captives with 
special consideration. Just as he had hoped, this 
propaganda brought immediate results, and in the 
days following the battle of Abu el Lissal groups 
were constantly coming in holding their weapons 
above their heads and crying “Moslem! Moslem!” 
in imitation of the German cry of “Kamerad.” 





CHAPTER VIII 


THE CAPTURE OF KING SOLOMON’S ANCIENT 
SEAPORT 


AWRENCE had left El Wejh, hundreds of 
miles to the south, with but two months’ ra- 
tions. After giving a part of his supplies to 

the captured Turks, the food situation became criti- 
cal. Nevertheless the half-starved Arab army, led 
by this youngster, continued its march through the 
jagged, barren mountains that bite the North 
Arabian sky. The news of their victories traveled 
ahead of them, and when Lawrence arrived at 
Gueirra, a Turkish post in King Solomon’s Moun- 
tains, twenty-five miles from Akaba, at the entrance 
to an extremely narrow pass known as the Wadi 
Ithm, the Gueirra garrison came out and laid down 
their arms without firing a shot. He then proceeded 
to march his Bedouins on, down the Wadi Ithm to 
Kethura, another outpost guarding the only land ap- 
proach to Akaba. There Lawrence charged another 
garrison and captured several hundred more men. 
Trekking through the gorge they came to an ancient 
well at Khadra, where two thousand years before the 
Romans had constructed a stone dam across the val- 
ley, the remains of which can still be seen. The 
99 


100 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Turks had massed their heavy artillery behind that 
ruined wall. It constituted the outermost defense of 
Akaba. By the time the Shereefian army arrived in 
front of this final barricade the Bedouins of the 
Amran Darausha and Neiwat tribes, who lived in the 
desert near Akaba, had heard of the great victories 
at Fuweilah and Abu el Lissal and were scampering 
across the lava mountains by the hundreds to join the 
advancing Arab forces. 

The overwhelming defeat of the Turkish battalion 
at Abu el Lissal was really the first phase of the 
battle of Akaba. ‘The second consisted in the spec- 
tacular manceuver when Lawrence accomplished what 
the Turks thought impossible and succeeded in lead- 
ing his scraggly, undisciplined horde of Bedouins 
through the precipitous King Solomon Mountains, 
over the old Roman wall, right past the bewildered 
Turkish artillerymen, and down into Akaba on the 
morning of July 6, 1917. But to save the Akaba 
garrison from massacre Lawrence and Nasir had to 
labor with their fierce followers from sunset to dawn. 
They would not have succeeded then, had not Nasir 
walked down the valley into No-Mans’-Land and sat 
on a rock to make his men quit firing. 

Akaba is picturesquely located at the southern end 
of the wide Wadi Araba, perhaps the driest and most 
desolate valley in the world, which runs down from 
the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Akaba. Up this same 
wadi Moses and the Israelites are believed to have 
made their way toward the Promised Land, and down 


CAPTURE OF ANCIENT SEAPORT 101 


this valley rode Mohammed, Ali, Abu Bekr, and 
Omar. It was here that Mohammed preached many 
of his first sermons. Beyond a narrow semicircle of 
date-palms which fringe the shore, lie the blue waters 
of the now deserted gulf where Solomon’s fleets, 
Phenician galleys, and Roman triremes rode at 
anchor. Behind Akaba loom jagged, volcanic, arid 
mountains. Like most of the smaller towns of the 
Near East the place itself is a chaotic jumble of mud 
huts. Awnings cover the narrow streets, and the 
stalls in the bazaar are filled with brocades, shabby 
prayer-rugs, cones of cane-sugar swarming with flies, 
piles of dates, and dishes of glistening brass and ham- 
mered copper. 

The Turks and Germans were so paralyzed and be- 
wildered by the unexpected achievement of the Arabs 
in getting across the mountains and through the 
passes that they surrendered without further ado. 
Immediately after the entrance into Akaba a Ger- 
- man officer stepped up and saluted Lawrence. He 
spoke neither Turkish nor Arabic and evidently 
did not even know there was a revolution in prog- 
ress. 

“What is all this about? What is all this about? 
Who are these men?” he shouted excitedly. 

“They belong to the army of King Hussein”—the 
Grand Shereef had by this time proclaimed himself 
king—‘‘who is in revolt against the Turks,” replied 
Lawrence. 

“Who is King Hussein?” asked the German. 


1022 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


“Emir of Mecca and ruler of this part of Arabia,’ 
was the reply. 

“Ach Himmel! And what am I?’ added the Ger- 
man officer in English. 

“You are a prisoner.” 

“Will they take me to Mecca?” 

“No, to Egypt.” 

“Is sugar very high over there?” 

“Very cheap.” 

“Good.” And he marched off, happy to be out of 
the war, and happier still to be heading for a amen: 
where he could have plenty of sugar. 

This time the plans of Emir Feisal’s youthful 
British adviser went through true to form. From 
now on the Turks were kept on the defensive. They 
were obliged to weaken their army by splitting it into 
two parts; one half remained in Medina, and the 
other defended the pilgrimage railway. If he had 
wanted to do so Lawrence could have dynamited the 
railway im so many places that the Turks would have 
been completely cut off at Medina; then, by bringing 
up a few long-range naval guns from the Gulf of 
Akaba, he could have blown Medina off the map and 
compelled the garrison to surrender. But he had an 
excellent reason for not attempting this, as we shall 
soon see. In his mind he had worked out a far finer 
and more ambitious scheme, the successful carrying 
out of which demanded that the Turks should be in- 
veigled into sending down more reinforcements to 
Medina, and as many guns, camels, mules, armored 





CAPTURE OF ANCIENT SEAPORT 103 


cars, aéroplanes, and other war materials as they could 
be compelled to part with from their other fronts. 
He hoped they would keep a huge garrison there 
until the end of the war, which would mean so many 
less Turks opposing the British armies in Palestine 
and Mesopotamia; and the supply-trains which 
would necessarily have to be sent down from Syria 
might be made a constant source of supply for the 
Arabs. If Medina were captured and the Turks all 
driven north, it would deprive Lawrence of this mag- 
nificent opportunity of maintaining his army on 
Turkish supplies. ‘That was far more to his advan- 
tage than occupying Medina. 

_ After the capture of Akaba, Lawrence and his men 
lived for ten days on unripe dates and on the meat of 
camels which had. been killed in the battle of Abu el 
Lissal. They were compelled to kill their own 
riding-camels at the rate of two a day to save them- 
selves and their hundreds of prisoners. Then in or- 
der to keep his army from starving, Lawrence 
jumped on his racing-camel and rode her contin- 
uously for twenty-two hours across the uninhabited 
mountains and desert valleys of the Sinai Peninsula. 
Completely worn out after this record ride, which 
came at the end of two months’ continuous fighting 
and a thousand miles of trekking across one of the 
most barren parts of the earth and living on soggy 
unleavened bread and dates and without having a 
bath for more than a month, he turned his camel over 
to an M.P. at one of the street corners in Port 


104 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Tewfik, Suez, walked a little unsteadily into the 
Sinai Hotel, and ordered a bath. For three hours 
he remained in the tub with a procession of Berberine 
boys serving him cool drinks. That day, he de- 
clares, was the nearest approach to the Mohammedan 
idea of paradise that he ever expects to experience. 
From Suez he went on to Ismailia, the midway sta- 
tion on the canal. 

Lawrence’s arrival in Arabia had been unheralded; 
even G.H.Q. in Cairo were ignorant as to his move- 
ments. His exploits first became known when he 
met General Allenby at Ismailia on the arrival of 
this new leader who had just been assigned to take 
over command of the Egyptian Expeditionary 
Forces. 

The incident was dramatic in its simplicity. Al- 
lenby had been sent out from London to succeed 
Sir Archibald Murray as commander-in-chief. He 
had just landed and was at the railway station in 
Ismailia walking up and down the platform with 
Admiral Wemyss. Lawrence, standing near-by in 
Arab garb, saw the important-looking general with 
the admiral. 

“Who’s that?’ he asked of Wemyss’s wee 
lieutenant. 

“Allenby,” was the reply. 

“What ’s he doing here?” queried Lawrence. 

“He has come out to take Murray’s place.” Law- 
rence was frightfully pleased. 

A few minutes later Lawrence had an opportunity 


Ne ne 


CAPTURE OF ANCIENT SEAPORT 105 


to report to Admiral Wemyss, who had been the god- 
father of the Arab “show.” He told him that Akaba 
had been taken but that his men were badly in need 
of food. ‘The admiral immediately promised to send 
ships, and a moment later he told Allenby what Law- 
rence had said. The general sent for him at once. 
The station was crowded with staff-officers and a 
throng of vociferous natives who were welcoming 
Allenby, when out of the mob stepped this bare- 
footed, fair-faced boy in Bedouin garb. 

“What news have you brought,” asked Allenby. 

In even, low tones, without any more expression on 
his face than if he were conveying compliments from 
the Grand Shereef, Lawrence reported that the 
Arabs had captured the ancient seaport at the head 
of the Gulf of Akaba. He gave all the credit for the 
victory to the Arabs, making no reference to the part 
he himself had played in the affair. He conveyed the 
impression that he was acting as a courier, although, 
as a matter of fact, the capture of that important 
point was due entirely to his own leadership and 
strategical genius. 

The general was immensely pleased, because Akaba 
was the most important point on his right flank and 
the principal Turkish base on the western coast of the 
Arabian Peninsula. 

Then when Lawrence explained in more detail the 
plight of the Arab troops Admiral Wemyss promised 
to send a vessel filled with food to Akaba. But Sir 
Rosslyn went even beyond that and acted in a way 


106 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


that will immortalize him in Arabian history. The 
Arabs were afraid lest the ‘Turks should return with 
reinforcements and capture Akaba; so the admiral 
moved his office, all his personal effects, and his staff 
ashore to a hotel in Ismailia, and sent his flag-ship 
round Sinai to Akaba for a whole month to bolster up 
the morale of the Arabs. ‘The presence of this huge 
floating fortress encouraged the Bedouins and con- 
vinced them that they were not going to be obliged to 
play a lone hand against the Turkish Empire. The 
British flag-ship was more tangible evidence of the 
strength of Britain than these desert nomads had ever 
seen before. 

Admiral Wemyss also lent Lawrence and his Arabs 
twenty machine-guns from his ships and several naval 
guns. The latter are still “somewhere” in Arabia, 
probably mounted on the roof of Auda Abu Tayi’s 
mud palace. Several months after the termination 
of the war Lawrence received a letter from the Ad- 
miralty asking him kindly to return one of their long- 
range guns which had been taken ashore for the Arab 
show. He replied that he was very sorry but that he 
had “mislaid it.” 

As a result of Lawrence’s victory at Akaba and his 
visit to Egypt, the British decided to back the Arabs 
to the limit in their campaign to win complete inde- 
pendence. The young archeologist was sent back 
to Akaba with unlimited resources, and within a few 
months he had conducted the campaign in such a 
brilliant manner that he was raised in rank from 








BEDOUIN “IRREGULARS”’ READY FOR A RAID ON THE TURKS 





SUNSET OVER THE FORT AT AKABA 


CAPTURE OF ANCIENT SEAPORT 107 


lieutenant to lieutenant-colonel, despite the fact that 
he hardly knew the difference between “right incline” 
and “present arms.” 

The Germans and Turks were not long in finding 
out that there was a mysterious power giving inspira- 
tion to the Arabs. Through their spies they dis- 
covered that Lawrence was the guiding spirit of the 
whole Arabian revolution. 'They offered rewards up 
to fifty thousand pounds for his capture dead or alive. 
But the Bedouins would not have betrayed their 
leader for all the gold in the fabled mines of Solomon. 

The fall of Akaba, next to the capture of the holy 
city of Mecca, was the most significant event of the 
Arabian revolution, because it unified the Arabs 
whom Lawrence had already won over to the cause 
of the revolution, and gave them confidence in them- 
selves. 

After winning his victory Lawrence was shrewd 
enough to take full advantage of it. Although his 
own strategy and personal bravery had played an all- 
important part in the success of these operations, he 
was astute enough to give all the credit to the princi- 
pal Arab leaders under him, such as Auda Abu Tayi 
and Shereef Nasir. Like children, these doughty 
old warriors were not at all reticent about accepting 
it, and, of course, from then on they were Lawrence's 
sworn friends. 

Anxious to make the most of this initial success, 
Lawrence sent couriers to all the tribes of the desert, 
although news of the battle of Abu el Lissal and the 


108 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


advance on Akaba seemed to travel as though flashed 
about Arabia by radio. He realized the tremendous 
importance of propaganda and sent some of his 
cleverest Arab lieutenants through the enemy lines 
to spread the news of the fall of Akaba far and wide 
to the remote corners of the Turkish Empire. 

So it was that this young Briton, just down from 
Oxford, away in a long-forgotten corner of the earth, 
captured the ancient seaport of Solomon where a 
battle had probably not been fought for a thousand 
years and more, thereby winning the second im- 
portant victory of the war in the Land of the Arabian 
Nights and paving the way for an invasion of Syria. 
From a mere local squabble, Lawrence’s victory at 
Akaba transformed the Hedjaz revolt into a cam- 
paign of far-reaching importance directed against the 
heart of the Turkish Empire; and from that day his 
undisciplined rabble of swarthy desert brigands be- 
came the right wing of Allenby’s army, and from 
then on this second lieutenant played the role of a 
lieutenant-general, 


pw“ nes, "ts 


CHAPTER IX 


ACROSS THE RED SEA TO JOIN LAWRENCE AND 
FEISAL 


MIR FEISAL and Colonel Lawrence had 
EL; got as far as Akaba with their campaign when 
Mr. Chase and I arrived from the Palestine 

front with our battery of cameras. It was by no 
means an easy matter even to get to the Arab base- 
camp and our adventures in doing so may even justify 
another digression from the story of Lawrence and his 
associates, in order to better illustrate how remote this 
campaign really was from the rest of the World War. 
Shortly after I had met Lawrence in Jerusalem, 
while lunching with General Allenby and the Duke 
of Connaught, the name of the archzologist turned 
soldier came up during the conversation. Out of 
curiosity I asked the commander-in-chief why the 
Arabian campaign and Lawrence’s exploits had been 
kept such a secret. He replied that it had been con- 
sidered advisable to say as little as possible, because 
they hoped that large numbers of the conscript Arabs 
fighting in the Turkish army might desert and join 
Shereef Hussein in his fight for Arabian independ- 
ence. They were afraid lest the Arabs of Syria, 
Palestine, and Mesopotamia whom the Turks had 


conscripted should get the mistaken idea that the Al- 
109 


110 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


lies were inspiring the Hedjaz revolt and hence erro< 
neously conclude that it was not a patriotic rebellion. 
For this reason the Allies were anxious that the cam- 
paign should appear in its true light as an independ- 
ent Arabian movement. But so successful had been 
Lawrence’s efforts that Allenby said it was no longer 
quite so necessary to maintain such strict secrecy, add- 
ing that if I happened to be interested in what was 
going on in Arabia he would be glad to have me join 
King Hussein’s army, and afterward tell the world 
a little of what the Arabs had done toward helping 
to win the Great War. 

This was exactly what I had often thought of ask- 
ing permission to do; but I had been warned that 
because of the secrecy with which the campaign was 
being conducted there was not the slightest chance 
of receiving the commander-in-chief’s consent. I of 
course Jost no time in accepting and jumped at this 
opportunity of going on what I was sure would be an 
adventure of a lifetime. 

We were told that it would be practically impossi- 
ble to make the journey overland from Palestine to 
Arabia, or at any rate that it could only be done by 
going through the Turkish lines in disguise. We had 
neither the time nor the inclination nor the necessary 
knowledge of the country and the language to at- 
tempt this; so, accompanied by Mr. Chase, my artist 
colleague, I returned to Egypt to consult the heads 
of the Arab Bureau in Cairo. There we were told: 

“You can get as far as Akaba in a cargo boat, but 


ACROSS THE RED SEA 11k 


next to Timbuctoo it is the most out-of-the-way place 
in the world. You will find no hotel porters at the 
dock to receive you, and you will have to be content 
with a block of coral for your pillow and a date-palm 
for your shelter.” 

In pre-war days a tramp wind-jammer returning 
from Borneo or the Solomon Islands with a cargo of 
copra would occasionally lose its way in a storm and 
drive up the Gulf of Akaba, but apart from rare oc- 
casions like that almost no one had visited the place 
for a thousand years. 

“You will get nothing to eat but unleavened bread, 
dates, and perhaps a few fried locusts,” remarked one 
general, on whose advice we bought many litile 
luxuries, including fifty bars of milk chocolate. A 
colonel cheerfully warned me, “If you value your 
lives, take plenty of cigarettes for the Bedos.” So 
we filled every crevice of our outfit with “gaspers,” 
which proved worth their weight in sovereigns. On 
the day we landed in Arabia the thermometer hap- 
pened to register above the melting-point of choco- 
late, and when I opened my kit-bag I found a semi- 
fluid mass of bullets, matches, cigarettes, pencils, 
note-books, and chocolate. 

On our way to Arabia we followed a roundabout 
route, sailing fifteen hundred miles up the Nile into 
the heart of Africa to Khartum, and then across the 
Nubian Desert for five hundred miles to Port Sudan 
on the Red Sea, where we hoped to get accommoda- 
ton on a tramp vessel of some sort. 


112 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Our first stop up the Nile was at Luxor, where 
we were given a welcome that had not been equaled 
since “Teddy” Roosevelt stopped there on his way 
back from hunting big game in East Africa. A 
swarm of haggard guides, who had been waiting four 
Jong years in vain for American tourists, mobbed us 
from sheer joy. Our welcome resembled a battle 
royal, and the runners from the Luxor Hotel even- 
tually succeeded in dragging us into their ramshackle 
gharry, and off we careened through streets lined with 
deserted tourists’ shops, with the rest of the crowd 
howling and gyrating behind us like dancing der- 
vishes. 

Our visit to Hundred-gated Thebes, the Temple of 
Karnak, and the Tombs of the Kings the following 
day was rather spoiled by a pitiful tale that our guide 
poured into our ears. 

“American tourist he no come no more. All we 
guides starve. Oh, woe! Oh, woe!’ wailed this 
melancholy old Arab. “Me guide here thirty-five 
years, and so help me Allah, the only real tourist in 
the world is you Americans. The Inglisse [ Eng- 
lish], German, and French spend all their time count- 
ing their centimes. If American see something he 
want he say, ‘How much?’ You tell him and, praise 
be to Allah, no matter what price is, he say, “All right, 
wrap erup! All us best guides specialize on Amer- 
icans. Before the war me no more bother guiding 
anybody but American than you bother to shoot baby 
elephant if you see big one. Why President Wilson 


ACROSS THE RED SEA 113 


no stop the war; and why,” he added in a pleading 
voice, “you Americans send money and food to Ar- 
menians and nothing to us poor starving guides of 
Egypt?” 

On the first evening after our arrival in Khartum 
we were dining with the chief of the Central African 
Intelligence Department at the House of the Hip- 
popotamus Head when suddenly I noticed his face 
turn pale. Glancing at the sky to the east I saw the 
reason. Coming straight toward Khartum was a 
great black wall that looked like a range of mountains 
moving down upon us. It was the dread huboob, a 
terrific African sand-storm. The dinner party broke 
off abruptly, and the other guests raced for their 
homes. Jumping on a donkey which was awaiting 
me in the outer court, I made a dash for the Charles 
Gordon Hotel, half a mile away. 

It was a glorious moonlight night with stars twin- 
kling radiantly all around to the north, west, and 
south, but straight ahead to the east I could see that 
mountain wall of sand churning toward me. It 
looked as though the crack o’ doom were approach- 
ing. Soon it was only a few hundred yards away, 
and then it broke over us. 

Flying sand stung my face like needles and blinded 
me. Leaning forward over the neck of my diminu- 
tive mount, I tried to offer as little resistance to the 
storm as possible, but it was all we could do to fight 
our way against that whirling mass of sand and reach 
the hotel. 


114 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


The heat indoors was so unbearable that every one 
tried sleeping with his windows open, and the sand 
threatened to bury us, beds and all. When I closed 
the windows the atmosphere was stifling, and the sand 
still swept in sheets through the crevices. ‘The storm 
raged for hours. There was not a house in Khartum 
that the sand did not penetrate. I have been through 
cyclones, cloud-bursts, arctic blizzards, fierce gales in 
the Southern Ocean, monsoons, typhoons, and 
Sumatras; but none of them could hold a candle to 
that huboob. In Alaska when a newcomer, or 
cheechacko, remains in the Far North through the 
long dark winter he becomes a “sourdough” and is ad- 
mitted to the fraternity of Arctic Pioneers. In the 
Sudan there is a similar saying that he who survives 
a huboob forthwith becomes a pucka African. But 
seventy below in the Yukon is preferable to one hun- 
dred above in a Sudan huboob! 

One afternoon a representative from the British 
Intelligence Office took me a few miles distant from 
Khartum to call on “the holiest man in the Sudan.” 
So rich had the natives grown from the war that they 
were refusing to sell their grain supplies, which were 
badly needed by the armies in Palestine and Arabia. 
I had expressed a desire to meet this holy man, and it 
occurred to the authorities that a visit from a foreigner 
might flatter him and put him in a sufficiently pleas- 
ant frame of mind to enable them to wheedle him 
into selling his store of grain, which would cause the 
other natives to follow suit. 


ACROSS THE RED SEA 115 


We set out in the governor’s gharry, a picturesque 
victoria drawn by high-spirited white horses. Our 
driver was a wild-eyed fuzzy-wuzzy with a mop of 
crinkly hair full of mutton fat, with long wooden 
skewers sticking out at all angles. Off we galloped 
across the desert to the village of Berri, where we 
found Shereef Yusef el Hindi, the holy man, await- 
ing us at the gate of his mud-brick palace. The 
shereef, a tall, thin-faced, distinguished-looking Arab 
with hypnotic eyes, garbed in sandals, a robe of green 
and white silk, and green turban, ushered us into his 
garden, where we were invited to review the most 
bewildering array of drinks that I had ever seen. 
There were concoctions of everything from pome- 
granate-juice to sloe gin and from rose-water to a 
horse’s neck. ‘They were of every shade from mauve 
to taupe. They were served in every sort of con- 
tainer from cut-glass tumblers to silver goblets. 
Fortunately, custom only required us to take a sip 
of each; otherwise the result would have been catas- 
trophic for many were of subtle potency. 

_ I remember that afternoon call as a series of sur- 
prises, of which the first was the beauty of the garden 
inside the ugly adobe outer walls of the shereef’s 
palace. The second was the variety of fluid refresh- 
ment placed before us. Surely Shereef Yusef el 
Hindi must have one of the genii from “The Arabian 
Nights” mixing drinks in his palace. Even in pre- 
prohibition days, when assigned to cover a national 
college fraternity convention, never was I invited 


116 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


to pass through such an ordeal by drink as I faced at 
Shereef Yusef el Hindi’s oasis. The third surprise 
came when I saw the attractive interior of his palace 
as we passed through on our way to a Moorish balcony 
near the roof, where we were confronted with another 
relay of drinks. But the climax came when I dis- 
covered that my host instead of being an African 
witch-doctor was a savant of wide learning. His 
library even contained Arabic translations of the 
speeches of Mr. Lloyd George, Lord Balfour, 'Theo- 
dore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. In fact I 
found that this Sudanese holy man knew more about 
the history of my own country than I did! 


We discussed religion, and I was impressed by his 
spirit of tolerance. “I believe, as do all Moslems 
who deserve to be called educated,” said he, “that the 
fundamental principles underlying the world’s great- 
est religions—Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and 
Mohammedanism—are the same; that there is but one 
God and that he is supreme; that we should be tol- 
erant of the opinions of others; that all men should 
live together as brothers and do unto others as we 
would have others do unto us.” 

It was not difficult to understand why Shereef 
Yusef el Hindi was looked wpon as a holy man by 
his ignorant, half-civilized fellow-countrymen. His 
princely manners, his dignity and poise, his musical 
bell-like voice, his large, lustrous, hypnotic brown 
eyes, and his wisdom would have won him distinction 


ACROSS THE RED SEA 117 


in any country. He is not an Ethiopian but is a 
descendant of the Arabian tribe of Koreish to which 
Mohammed belonged. 

Being a holy man in the Sudan is a lucrative pro- 
fession. Shereef Yusef el Hindi spends most of his 
time naming babies. When a child is born the father 
comes running to him, prostrates himself at the 
shereef’s feet, and says, “O noble one, what name 
shall I bestow upon my child?” 

Whereupon the holy man replies: “O faithful 
one, arise! Go thy way and return again upon the 
morrow.” 

Then, when the father returns the next day, the 
shereef intones: “Allah be praised. In a vision last 
night the Prophet appeared and revealed to me that 
your faith should be rewarded and your child blessed 
with the name of his own daughter, Fatima. Five 
dollars, please!” 

From Khartum we crossed the Nubian Desert to 
Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Here, as we had 
hoped, we found a tramp steamer bound for the 
Arabian coast. She was a much torpedoed cargo- 
boat which had been transferred from the British In- 
dian coastal service to the Mediterranean, where dur- 
ing the first years of the war she had survived several 
harrowing years serving as a target for the kaiser’s 
U-boats. On board with us were 226 Sudanese 
sheep, 150 horses and mules from America and Aus- 
tralia, sixty-seven donkeys from Abyssinia, ninety- 
eight deserters from the Turkish army, eighty-twa 


118 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Egyptian fellaheen laborers, thirty-four Gordon 
Highlanders, six British officers, and two obsolete 
aéroplanes. Our crew consisted of Hindus, Jav- 
anese, Somalis, Berberines, and fuzzy-wuzzies. The 
skipper of this modern ‘ark was a rotund, jovial 
Scotch-Irishman by the name of Rose. I doubt 
whether Captain Kidd in the palmiest days of Carib- 
bean piracy ever put to sea with such a motley cargo 
and crew. | 

The different nationalities on board segregated 
themselves into little racial colonies and did their own 
cooking in various parts of the main deck. It would 
be impossible to imagine what the good ship Ozarda 
looked like after we had been at sea for a few days— 
and what she smelled like! Some of the Sudanese 
were from the Nubian Desert, where it is difficult 
enough to get water for drinking purposes, to say 
nothing of water for bathing; some of them had 
never had a real bath in their lives. But there was 
one of them whom the Highlanders nicknamed Bath- 
ing Bert. This man insisted on having his tub out 
of a bucket five times each day. 

The Egyptian laborers entertained us incessantly 
with their fantastic ceremonial dances. There was 
not room enough for all of them to dance at a time, 
and so they went at it in relays. Some of them 
danced until they collapsed on the deck from ex- 
haustion. Fainting, to them, was merely a sign that 
their spirits had been transported to heaven for a few 
minutes’ sojourn with the Almighty. 


ACROSS THE RED SEA 119 


There was no passenger accommodation, so that we 
had to sleep out on the deck with the donkeys and 
mules. I bunked beside a mouse-colored mule from 
Hannibal, Missouri, the home of Mark Twain. She 
was very pessimistic. She seemed to be worrying 
about something back home and didn’t sleep well. 
Neither did I! Mark Twain would have lost his 
sense of humor if he had been in my place. 

We had a British officer on board who was bound 
for the Persian Gulf. He was laboring under the 
erroneous impression that he had fallen heir to the | 
mantle of George Robey or Harry Lauder. He 
used to tell a story until we were almost bored to ex- 
tinction. I am going to repeat one of his tales, not 
because I think it is funny but because I know it is 
not funny! I want to show you the sort of thing we 
had toendure. He said that he was out hunting lions 
once in Central Africa; none of us doubted that for 
he had knocked about all over the world from Kam- 
chatka to the Kameruns. He said that one day a 
lion jumped at him out of the bush but that he ducked 
just in time, causing the lion to go right over his 
head. Some minutes passed, and as the lion failed 
to return he crawled along on his stomach to recon- 
noiter. Coming to an open space he peered cau- 
tiously through the tall grass, and there he saw that 
same lion—practising low jumps! One day we hit 
upon the idea of giving cigarettes to the Turkish de- 
serters, who could understand only a few words of 
English, in order to get them to listen to his stories. 


120 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


They would laugh when he laughed, and it satisfied 
him and certainly relieved the rest of us. 

When we finally arrived at the ancient and long 
deserted seaport of King Solomon at the head of the 
Gulf of Akaba, our ark anchored half a mile 
offshore. We eventually pushed off, bound for the 
distant fringe of palm-trees at the base-of King Sol- 
omon’s Mountains on board a lighter loaded down 
with donkeys and mules. One unlucky donkey was 
kicked overboard by a nervous mule. Immediately 
two sharks appeared and attacked him fore and aft. 
One seized a front leg and the other the poor donkey’s 
rump, and literally they pulled him in two. We 
were told by the skipper of our ark that there are 
more sharks in the Red Sea than in any other waters 
of the globe. 

When we grounded on the coral beach we were 
greeted by several thousand Bedouins, who welcomed 
us by blazing into the air with their rifles and pistols. 
This firing had begun when we were still afar off, 
and Mr. Chase and I thought we were arriving in the 
midst of a battle. So fantastic and full of color was 
that palm-fringed coral shore, and so picturesque 
were the Bedouins with their flowing beards, their © 
gorgeous robes, their strange head-dress, and their 
array of ancient and modern weapons of every sort, 
that it all seemed like some bizarre Oriental pageant. 
So indeed it was, and these were some of Colonel 
Lawrence’s modern Arabian knights. 

King Solomon’s long-forgotten port had been 





ACROSS THE RED SEA 121 


turned into a great base-camp, and enormous piles of 
supplies lay stacked in the sand and under the palms. 
Several of the British officers who were in charge of 
the receiving of supplies at Akaba took us to a 
near-by tent and slaked our growing thirst, and a 
few hours later Lawrence himself came down the. 
Wadi Ithm, returning from one of his mysterious ex- 
peditions into the blue. 

With Lawrence, no two days in the desert were 
ever the same, so that it would be impossible to de- 
scribe a typical one. But the camp routine at the 
headquarters of the Arabian army, when no ghazu 
(raid) was in progress, followed some such program 
as this: At 5 A.M., as the first rays of dawn fell on 
the jagged peaks of Sinai, the army imam would 
climb the highest sand-dune and give the morning 
call to prayer. He was a chap with such astonishing 
vocal powers that his nasal chant woke every man and 
animal in Akaba. Immediately after he had finished 
calling the Arabian proletariat, Emir Feisal’s private 
imam would softly intone the morning call at the door 
of his tent: “Praise be to Allah who makes day 
succeed the night!” 

Miss Gertrude Bell, the famous Syrian traveler, 
who, although a woman, served on the Intelligence 
Staff in the Near East during the war, has written a 
vivid description of the glorious intoxication of a 
desert morning: “To wake in the desert dawn is like 
waking in the heart of an opal. To my mind the 
saying about the Bay of Naples should run differ- 


122 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


ently. See the desert on a fine morning and die— 
if youcan.” Surely a fascinating book of adventure 
and romance could be written about the war-time ex- 
perience of Miss Bell in the Mesopotamian Desert. 
As a staff officer she did everything required of any 
man but wear a spine-pad and shorts. 

A few minutes after the call to prayer had aroused 
the camp, a cup of sweetened coffee would turn up, 
brought in by one of Feisal’s slaves. ‘The emir had 
five young Abyssinian blacks; slaves who were the 
acme of fidelity, because the emir did not treat them 
as slaves, nor regard them as such. Whenever one 
of them desired money, Feisal ordered him to help 
himself to whatever he needed from his bag of gold. 
No matter what was taken, he never complained, and 
as a result, the thought of robbing never seemed to 
occur to them. 

At 6 A. M. Lawrence was in the habit of breakfast- 
ing with Feisal in the emir’s tent, squatting Bedouin 
fashion on an old Baluchi prayer-rug. Breakfast on 
lucky days included a many-layered pastry of richly 
spiced puffed bread called Mecca cakes, and cooked 
durra, a small round white seed—rather nasty stuff. 
Then, of course, there were the inevitable dates. 
After breakfast little glasses of sweetened tea were 
produced. From then until 8 4. m. Lawrence would 
discuss the possible events of the day either with the 
British officers or with some of the more prominent 
Arab leaders. At that time Feisal worked with his 
secretary or talked over private affairs in his tent 


a i eh 


ACROSS THE RED SEA 123 


with Lawrence. At 8 a.m. Feisal would hold court 
and grant audiences in the Diwan tent. According 
to the regular procedure, it was customary for the 
emir to sit at the end of a great rug onadais. Callers 
or petitioners sat in front of the tent in a half-circle 
until they were called up. All questions were settled 
summarily, and nothing was left over. 

One morning I was in the tent with Lawrence when 
a young Bedouin was hauled in charged with having 
the evileye. Feisal was not present. Lawrence or- 
dered the offender to sit at the opposite side of the 
tent and look at him. Then for ten minutes he re- 
garded him with steady gaze, his steel-blue eyes seem- 
ing to bore a hole into the culprit’s very soul. At the 
end of the ten minutes, Lawrence dismissed the 
Bedouin. The evil spell had been driven off! By 
the grace of Allah. 

Another day a member of Lawrence’s body-guard 
came to him with the complaint that one of his com- 
panions possessed the evil eye. Said he, “O sea of 
justice, yonder fellow looked at my camel, and 
straightway it went lame.” Lawrence settled this 
difficulty by putting the man charged with the evil 
eye on the lame camel and giving the defendant’s 
camel to the man who brought up the charge. 

Blue eyes terrify the average Arab. Lawrence 
possesses two that are bluer than the waters of the 
Mediterranean, and so the Bedouins decided there 
was something superhuman about him. They them- 
selves nearly all have eyes like black velvet. 


124 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Whenever Feisal was present, Lawrence would 
step aside and decline to decide disputes. He had no 
ambition to become the ruler of Arabia himself, and 
he knew that it would be far better for the future of 
the Arabs and for Emir Feisal if their differences 
were handled in the usual way by one of their own 
people. In fact, Lawrence never did anything him- 
self that he could delegate to an Arab who was 
capable of handling it successfully. 

Usually at 11:30 a.m. Feisal arose and walked 
back to his living-tent, where a little lunch would be 
served. Lawrence, in the meantime, would spend 
half an hour or so reading the inevitable Aristophanes 
or a favorite English poet. He carried three books 
all through the campaign: “The Oxford Book of 
English Verse,’ Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur,” and 
Aristophanes, which shows his catholic taste. 

Lunch usually consisted of dishes such as stewed 
thorn-buds, lentils, unleavened bread cooked in the 
sand, and rice or honey cakes. I ate with a spoon, al- 
though the Arabs used their fingers, as did Lawrence. 
After lunch there followed a short relay of general 
talk, rounding out the conversation of the luncheon 
hour, and, in the meantime, black bitter coffee and 
sweetened tea would be served. In drinking tea and 
coffee the tribesmen would make as much noise as 
possible. It is the polite way of indicating that you 
are enjoying your drink. The emir would then dic- 
tate letters to an Arab scribe or enjoy a siesta, while 
Lawrence, absorbed in Wordsworth or Shelley, 





ACROSS THE RED SEA 125 


squatted on a prayer-rug in his own tent. If there 
were afternoon cases to be disposed of, Shereef Law- 
rence or Shereef Feisal would again hold court in the 
reception-tent. From 5 until 6 p.m, Feisal would 
usually grant private audiences, and at such times 
Lawrence sat with him, since the discussion nearly al- 
ways would have to do with the night’s reconnaissance 
and future military operations. 

Meanwhile, behind the servants’ tent a fire would 
be started with a pile of thorns. Another sheep’s 
throat would be cut, in the name of Allah the Merci- 
ful and Compassionate, and put on to roast. At 
6 P. M. would come the evening meal, much like lunch 
but with large fragments of mutton crowning the 
rice-heap, after which would follow intermittent cups 
of tea until bedtime, which for Lawrence was never 
any fixed hour. At night Lawrence would have 
many of his most important consultations with the 
Arab leaders, but occasionally Feisal would entertain 
his intimate associates with stories of his adventures 
in Syria and Turkey, during the eighteen years when 
his family lived at the Sublime Porte under the wary 
eye of the Red Sultan. 

The rest of us would often read well into the night. 
Before leaving Egypt I had picked up second-hand 
copies of the records of a few great Arabian travel- 
ers, such as Burkhardt, Burton, and Doughty. With 
the exception of Doughty’s monumental master- 
pieces I found none of the books in my haphazard 
collection more fascinating than Miss Bell’s “The 


126 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Desert and the Sown.” My interest in it was stim< 
ulated by the stories which Colonel Lawrence related 
to me of the war-time adventures of the brilliant 


authoress. This extraordinary Englishwoman had 


been wandering about remote corners of the Near 
East for a number of years prior to the war. She 
was a scholar and a scientist, not an idle traveler in 
quest of notoriety. With a lone Arab companion or 
two she had trekked for hundreds of miles along the 
fringe of the Great Arabian Desert, visiting the wild 
tribes and studying their language and customs. So 
vast was her knowledge that the heads of the British 
Intelligence Department in Mesopotamia asked her 
to accept a staff appointment, and she played no 
small part in winning the friendship of some of the 
most bloodthirsty tribesmen residing in the Tigris and 
Euphrates Valleys. In her book, “The Desert and 
the Sown,” Miss Bell throws much interesting light 
on the life of the desert-dwellers: 


The fortunes of the Arab are as varied as those of a gam- 
bler on the stock exchange. One day he is the richest man in 
the desert, and the next morning he may not have a single 
camel foal to his name. He lives in a state of war, and 
even if the surest pledges have been exchanged with the 


neighbouring tribes there is no certainty that a band of _ 


raiders from hundreds of miles away will not descend on 
his camp in the night, as a tribe unknown to Syria, the 
Beni Awajeh, fell, two years ago, on the lands south-east 
of Aleppo, crossing three hundred miles of desert, Marduf 
(two on a camel) from their seat above Bagdad, carrying 


ACROSS THE RED SEA 127 


off all the cattle and killing scores of people. How many 
thousand years this state of things has lasted, those who 
shall read the earliest records of the inner desert will tell 
us, for it goes back to the first of them, but in all the 
centuries the Arab has bought no wisdom from experience. 
He is never safe, and yet he behaves as though security were 
his daily bread. He pitches his feeble little camps, ten or 
fifteen tents together, over a wide stretch of undefended and 
indefensible country. He is too far from his fellows to 
call in their aid, too far as a rule to gather the horsemen 
together and follow after the raiders whose retreat must be 
sufficiently slow, burdened with the captured flocks, to 
guarantee success to a swift pursuit. Having lost all his 
worldly goods, he goes about the desert and: makes his 
plaint, and one man gives him a strip or two of goats’ hair 
cloth, and another a coffee-pot, a third presents him with a 
camel, and a fourth with a few sheep, till he has a roof to 
cover him and enough animals to keep his family from 
hunger. There are good customs among the Arabs, as 
Namrud said. So he bides his time for months, perhaps 
for years, until at length opportunity ripens, and the horse- 
men of his tribe with their allies ride forth and recapture all 
the flocks that had been carried off and more besides, and 
the feud enters another phase. The truth is, that the 
ghazu (raid) is the only industry the desert knows and the 
only game. As an industry it seems-to the commercial 
mind to be based on a false conception of the laws of supply 
and demand, but as a game there is much to be said for it. 
The spirit of adventure finds full scope in it—you can 
picture the excitement of the night ride across the plain, 
the rush of the mares in the attack, the glorious popping 
of rifles and the exhilaration of knowing yourself a fine 


rhe 
128 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


fellow as you turn homewards with the spoil. It is the best 
sort of fantasia, as they say in the desert, with a spice of 
danger behind it. Not that the danger is alarmingly great: 
a considerable amount of amusement can be got without 
much bloodshed, and the raiding Arab is seldom bent on 
killmg. He never lifts his hand against women and chil- 
dren, and if here and there a man falls it is almost by 
accident, since who can be sure of the ultimate destination 
of a rifle bullet once it is embarked on its lawless course? 
This is the Arab view of the ghazu. 


— 





CHAPTER X 


THE BATTLE OF SEIL EL HASA 


S they pushed northward from the head of 
A the Gulf of Akaba, the Hedjaz forces were 

joined by the Ibn Jazi Howeitat and the 
Beni Sakhr, two of the best fighting tribes of the 
whole Arabian Desert. About the same date the 
Juheinah, the Ateibah, and the Anazeh came riding 
in on their camels to join Feisal and Lawrence. 

After. the fall of Akaba, Lawrence had made sev- 
eral trips to Palestine to confer with Allenby. Erom 
that time the British in Palestine and King Hussein’s 
army were in close codperation. 

The Arab army had been divided into two distinct 
parts, one known as regulars and the other as ir- 
regulars. The regulars were all infantrymen; there 
were not more than twenty thousand of them. They 
were either deserters from the Turkish army or men 
of Arab blood who had been fighting under the sul- 
tan’s flag and who had volunteered to join the forces 
of King Hussein after being taken prisoner by the 
British in Mesopotamia or in Palestine. At first 
they were used mainly for garrisoning old Turkish. 
posts captured by the advancing Shereefian horde. 


Later on, after they had been thoroughly trained, 
129 


180 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


MEDITERRANEAN 


pa Jas 





BATTLE OF SEIL EL HASA 131 


they were used as storm-troops in attacking fortified 
positions. ‘The Arab regulars were under an Irish- 
man, Colonel P. C. Joyce, who, next to Lawrence, 
perhaps played a more important part in the Arabian 
campaign than any other non-Moslem. The irregu- 
lars, who were by far the most numerous, were 
Bedouins mounted on camels and horses. In all, 
Lawrence had now over two hundred thousand fight- 
ing men available. 

The battle of Seil el Hasa illustrates the manner in 
which he handled King Hussein’s forces. A Turkish 
regiment, under the command of Hamid Fahkri 
Bey, composed of infantry, cavalry, mountain artil- 
lery, and machine-gun squads, was sent over the 
Hedjaz Railway from Kerak, southeast of the Dead 
Sea, to recapture the town of Tafileh, which had 
fallen into the hands of the Arabian army. ‘The 
Turkish regiment had been hurriedly formed in the 
Hauran and Amman and was short of supplies. 

When the Turks came in contact with the Bedouin 
patrols at Seil el Hasa, they drove them back into 
the town of Tafileh. Lawrence and his Shereefian 
staff had laid out a defensive position on the south 
bank of the great valley in which Tafileh stands, and 
Shereef Zeid, youngest of the four sons of King Hus- 
sein, occupied that position during the night, with 
five hundred regulars and irregulars. At the same 
time, Lawrence sent most of the baggage of his army 
off in another direction, and all the natives of the town 
thought the Arab army was running away. 


182 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


“T think they were,’ Lawrence remarked to me. 
Tafileh was seething with excitement. Sheik Dhiab 
el Auran, the amateur Sherlock of the Hedjaz, had 
brought in reports of growing dissatisfaction among 
the villagers, and rumors of treachery; so Lawrence 
went down from his housetop, before dawn, into the 
crowded streets to do a bit of necessary eavesdrop- 
ping. Dressed in his voluminous robes, he had no 
difficulty in concealing his identity in the dark. 
There was much criticism of King Hussein, and the 
populace was not over-respectful. Every one was 
screaming with terror, and the town of Tafileh was 
in a state of tumult. Homes were being speedily 
vacated, and goods were being bundled through the 
lattice windows into the crowded streets. Mounted 
Arabs were galloping up and down, firing wildly into 
the air and through the palm branches. With each 
flash of the rifles the cliffs of Tafileh gorge stood out 
in momentary relief, sharp and clear against the 
topaz sky. Just at dawn the enemy bullets began 
to fall, and Lawrence went out to Shereef Zeid and 
persuaded him to send one of his officers with two 
fusils-mitrailleurs to support the Arab villagers, who 
were still holding the southern crest of the foot-hills. 
The arrival of the machine-gunners revived their 
spirits and stimulated the Arabs to attack again. 
With a mighty shout calling upon the Prophet of 
God, they drove the Turks over another ridge and 
across a small plain to the Wadi el Hasa. They 
took the ridge but were held up there and found 


BATTLE OF SEIL EL HASA 133 


the main body of Hamid Fahkri’s Turkish army 
posted just behind it. The fighting became hotter 
now; on both sides men were dropping thickly. 
Continuous bursts of machine-gun fire and heavy 
shelling checked the ardor of the Arabs. Zeid hesi- 
tated to send forward his reserves, and so Lawrence 
hurriedly rode to the north of Tafileh for reinforce- 
ments. On his way he met his machine-gunners 
returning; five true believers had been sent to Para- 
dise, one gun had exploded, and they were out of 
ammunition. Lawrence sent back urgent messages 
to Zeid to rush forward a mountain-gun, more am- 
munition, and all other available machine-guns to 
one of his reserve positions at the southern end of the 
little plain between El Hasa and Tafileh Valley. 
Then Lawrence galloped back to his front line on 
the ridge, where he found things in a precarious state. 
The ridge was being held by just thirty Ibn Jazi 
Howeitat mounted men and a handful of villagers. 
He could see the enemy working through the pass and 
along the eastern boundary to the ridge of the plain, 
where twenty Turkish machine-guns were concen- 
trating their fire. An attempt was being made to 
flank the ridge which the Arabs were holding. ‘The 
German officers directing the Turks were also correct- 
ing the fusing of the shrapnel, which had been grazing 
the top of the hill and bursting harmlessly over the 
desert plain. As Lawrence sat there, they began to 
spray the sides and top of the hill with steel splinters 
and with startling results, and he knew that the loss 


1384 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


of the position was but a matter of minutes. A 
squadron of Albatross scouts flew up and helped to 
minimize the chances of the Shereefian forces by 
bombing them heavily from the air. 

Lawrence gave his Motalga horsemen all the cart- 
ridges that he could collect, and the Arabs on foot ran 
back over the plain. Hewasamong them. Since he 
had come straight up the cliffs from Tafileh, his ani- 
mals had not caught up with him; the mounted men 
held out for fifteen minutes more and then galloped 
back unhurt. Lawrence collected his men in the 
reserve position on a ridge about sixty feet high, com- 
manding an excellent view of the plain. It was now 
about noon. He had lost fifteen men and had only 
eighty left. But, a few minutes later, several hun- 
dred Ageyl and some of his other men, with a Hotch- 
kiss automatic machine-gun, came up. Letfi el Assli, 
a Syrian, arrived with two more machine-guns, and 
Lawrence held his own until three o’clock, when 
Shereef Zeid came up with mountain artillery and 
more machine-guns and with fifty cavalrymen and 
two hundred Arabs on foot. 

Meanwhile, the Turks had occupied his old front 
lines. Fortunately, Lawrence had their exact range. 
He had coolly paced it off while his followers were re- 
treating pell-mell to their reserved position. He 
then rushed all his artillery to the top of the ridge and 
despatched the cavalry to the right, to work up be- 
yond the eastern boundary ridge. ‘These mounted 
men were fortunate enough to get forward without 


BATTLE OF SEIL EL HASA 135 


being seen, until they had turned the Turkish flank at 
two thousand yards. There they made a dismounted 
attack, dancing forward with white puffs of smoke 
rippling from their rifles. 

Meanwhile more than a hundred Arabs of the Aimi 
tribe, who had refused to fight the previous day be- 
cause they were not satisfied with the amount of loot 
they were receiving, came up and joined Lawrence. 
There are few Bedouins who can resist the temptation 
to participate in a good fight when they see one com- 
ingon. He sent them to his left flank, and they crept 
down behind the western ridge of the plain to within 
two hundred yards of the Turkish Maxims. The 
ridge which the Turks occupied at that time was of 
a flint-like rock, so that intrenchment was impossible. 
The ricochets of the shells and shrapnel as they 
struck the flint boulders and glanced off were horrible, 
causing heavy losses among the enemy. Lawrence 
ordered the men on his left flank to fire an unusually 
heavy burst from their Hotchkiss and Vickers 
machine-guns at the Turks manning the Maxims. 
These were so accurate that they completely wiped 
the latter out. Then he ordered his cavalry to charge 
the retreating Turks from the right flank, while he 
also moved forward from the center with his infantry 
and banners waving defiantly. Horse and man, the 
Turks collapsed and their attack crumpled. At the 
sun’s decline Lawrence occupied the Turkish lines 
and chased the enemy back past their guns into the 
Hasa Valley. It was dark before his followers gave 


136 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


up the pursuit, exhausted from lack of sleep and food. 
“Allahu Akbar,” cried the weary men as they fell 
upon their knees with their faces toward Mecca, giv- 
ing praise to Allah for their victory. Lawrence had 
put to flight a whole Turkish regiment. Among the 
slain lay Hamid Fahkri. 





CHAPTER XI 


LAWRENCE THE TRAIN-WRECKER 


ATE never played a stranger prank than 
i when she transformed this shy young Oxford 

graduate from a studious archeologist into 
the leader of a hundred thrilling raids, creator of 
kings, commander of an army, and world’s champion 
train-wrecker. 

One day Lawrence’s column was trekking along 
the Wadi Ithm. Behind him rode a thousand Be- 
douins mounted on the fleetest racing-camels ever 
brought down the Negb. The Bedouins were im- 
provising strange war-songs describing the deeds of 
the blond shereef whom General Storrs had intro- 
duced to me as “the uncrowned king of Arabia.” 
Lawrence headed the column. He paid no attention 
to the song lauding him as a modern Abu Bekr. We 
were discussing the possibility of ancient Hittite 
civilization forming the connecting link between the 
civilizations of Babylon and Nineveh and ancient 
Crete. But his mind was on other things and sud- 
denly he broke off to remark: 

“Do you know, one of the most glorious sights I 
have ever seen is a train-load of Turkish soldiers as- 


cending skyward after the explosion of a tulip!’ 
137 


1388 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Three days later the column started off at night in 
the direction of the Pilgrim Railway. In support of 
Lawrence were two hundred Howeitat. After two 
days’ hard riding across a country more barren than 
the mountains of the moon, and through valleys rem- 
iniscent of Death Valley, California, the raiding 
column reached a ridge of hills near the important 
Turkish railway-center and garrisoned town of Maan. 
At a signal from Lawrence all dismounted, left the 
camels, walked up to the summit of the nearest hill, 
and from between sandstone cliffs looked down across 
the railway track. 

This was the same railway that had been built some 
years before to enable the Turkish Government to 
keep a closer hand on Arabia through transport of 
. troops. It also simplified the problem of transporta- 
tion for pilgrims to Medina and Mecca. Medina was 
garrisoned by an army of over twenty thousand Turks 
and was strongly fortified. Lawrence and his Arabs 
could have severed this line completely at any time, 
but they chose a shrewder policy. 'Train-load after 
train-load of supplies and ammunition must be sent 
down to Medina over that railway. So whenever. 
Lawrence and his followers ran out of food or am- 
munition they had a quaint little habit of slipping 
over, blowing up a train or two, looting it, and dis- 
appearing into the blue with everything that had been 
so thoughtfully sent down from Constantinople. 


As a result of the experience he gained on these ~ 


raids, Lawrence’s knowledge of the handling of high 


LAWRENCE THE TRAIN-WRECKER 139 


explosives was as extensive as his knowledge of 
archeology, and he took great pride in his unique 
ability as a devastator of railways. The Bedouins, 
on the other hand, were entirely ignorant of the use 
of dynamite; so Lawrence nearly always planted all 
of his own mines and took the Bedouins along merely 
for company and to help carry off the loot. 

He had blown up so many trains that he was as 
familiar with the Turkish system of transportation 
and patrols as were the Turks themselves. In fact 
he had dynamited Turkish trains passing along the 
Hedjaz Railway with such regularity that in Damas- 
cus seats in the rear carriage sold for five and six 
times their normal value. Invariably there was a 
wild scramble for seats at the rear of a train; because 
Lawrence nearly always touched off his tulips, as he 
playfully called his mines, under the engine, with the 
result that the only carriages damaged were those in 
front. 

There were two important reasons why Lawrence 
preferred not to instruct the Arabs in the use of high 
explosives. First of all, he was afraid that the Bed- 
ouins would keep on playfully blowing up trains 
even after the termination of the war. They looked 
upon it merely as an ideal form of sport, one that was 
both amusing and lucrative. Secondly, it was ex- 
tremely dangerous to leave footmarks along the rail- 
way line, and he preferred not to delegate tulip plant- 
ing to men who might be careless. 

The column crouched behind great chunks of sand- 


140 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


stone for eight hours until a number of patrols had 
passed by. Lawrence satisfied himself that they 
were going at intervals of two hours. At midday, 
while the Turks were having their siesta, Lawrence 
slipped down to the railway line, and, walking a short 
distance on the sleepers in his bare feet in order not 
to leave impressions on the ground which might be 
seen by the Turks, he picked out what he considered a 
proper spot for planting a charge. Whenever he 
merely wanted to derail the engine of a train he would 
use only a pound of blasting gelatin; when he wanted 
to blow it up he would use from forty to fifty pounds. 
On this occasion, in order that no one might be dis- 
appointed, he used slightly more than fifty pounds. 
It took him a little more than an hour to dig a hole 
between the sleepers, bury the explosive, and run a 
fine wire underneath the rail, over the embankment, 
and up the hillside. 

Laying a mine is rather a long and tedious task. 
Lawrence first took off a top layer of railway ballast, 
which he placed in a bag that he carried under his 
cloak for that purpose. He next took out enough 
earth and rock to fill two five-gallon petrol tins. This 
he carried off to a distance of some fifty yards from 
the track and scattered along so that it would not be 
noticed by the Turkish patrols. After filling the 
cavity with his fifty-pound tulip-seed of dynamite, he 
put the surface layer of ballast back in place and 
leveled it off with his hand. As a last precaution he 
took a camel’s-hair brush, swept the ground smooth, 





LAWRENCE THE TRAIN-WRECKER 141 


and then, in order not to leave a footprint, walked 
backward down the bank for twenty yards and with 
the brush carefully removed all trace of his tracks. 
He buried the wire for a distance of two hundred 
yards'up the side of the hill and then calmly sat down 
under a bush, right out in the open, and waited as 
nonchalantly as though tending a flock of sheep. 
When the first trains came along the guards stationed 
on top of the cars and in front of the engine, with 
their rifles loaded, saw nothing more extraordinary 
than a lone Bedouin sitting on the hillside with a 
shepherd’s staff in his hand. Lawrence allowed the 
front wheels of the engine to pass over the mine, and 
then, as his column lay there half paralyzed behind 
the boulders, he sent the current into the gelatin. It 
exploded with a roar like the falling of a six-story 
building. An enormous black cloud of smoke and 
dust went up. With a clanking and clattering of 
iron the engine rose from the track. It broke 
squarely intwo. ‘The boiler exploded, and chunks of 
iron and steel showered the country for a radius of 
three hundred yards. Numerous bits of boiler-plate 
missed Lawrence by inches. 

Instead of provisions, this train carried some four 
hundred Turkish soldiers on their way to the relief of 
Medina. They swarmed out of the coaches and 
_ started in a menacing manner toward Lawrence. 
All this time the Bedouins, lining the tops of the hills, 
were popping at the Turks. Evidently one Turkish 
officer suspected that the lone Arab was the mys- 


142 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


terious Englishman for whom rewards up to fifty 
thousand pounds had been offered. He shouted 
something, and the men, instead of shooting, ran to- 
ward Lawrence with the evident intention of taking 
him prisoner; but before they had advanced six paces 
Lawrence whipped out his long-barreled Colt from 
the folds of his aba and used it so effectively that they 
turned and fled. He always carried a heavy Amer- 
ican frontier-model weapon. Although very few 
persons ever actually saw him, it was well known 
among the British officers that he spent many hours 
at target-practice, with the result that he had made 
himself an expert shot. 

Many of the Turks dodged behind the embankment 
and began shooting through the carriage-wheels; but 
Lawrence, in anticipation of this, had posted two 
Lewis machine-guns just around a curve in the track, 
where they covered the opposite side of the railway 
embankment behind which the Turks had taken 
refuge. The gun-crews opened fire, and before the 
Turks knew what had happened their line was raked 
from end to end and every man behind the embank- 
ment either killed or wounded. The rest of the 
Turks who had remained on the train fled panic- 
stricken in all directions. 

The Arabs, who were crouching behind the rocks 
popping away with their rifles, charged down, tore 
open the carriages, and tossed out everything on 
board that was not nailed down. The loot consisted 
of sacks of Turkish silver coin and paper currency 


LAWRENCE THE TRAIN-WRECKER 148 


and many beautiful draperies which the Turks had 
taken from the private houses of wealthy Arabs in 
Medina. ‘The Bedouins piled all the loot along the 
embankment, and with shouts of glee commenced di- 
viding it among themselves, while Lawrence signed 
the duplicate way-bills and playfully returned one 
copy to a wounded Turkish guard whom he intended 
to leave behind. They were just like children around 
a Christmas tree. Occasionally two men would want 
the same silk Kermani rug and begin fighting over it. 
When that happened Lawrence would step between 
them and turn the rug over to some third man. 

Early in September, accompanied by two sheiks of 
the Ageilat Beni Atiyah from Mudowarrah, Law- 
rence left Akaba and trekked up to the multicolored 
sandstone cliff country which the tribesmen called 
Rum. In less than a week he had been joined by a 
force of 116 Toweiha, Zuwida, Darausha, Dhuman- 
iyah, Togatga, Zelebani, and Howeitat. 

The appointed rendezvous was a small railway 
bridge near Kilo 587 south of Damascus. Here 
Lawrence buried his usual bit of tulip-seed between 
the rails, and stationed Stokes and Lewis guns at 
vantage-points three hundred yards or so distant. 
The following afternoon a Turk patrol spotted them. 
An hour later a party of forty mounted Turks put 
out from the fort at Haret Ammar to attack the mine- 
laying party from the south. Another party of over 
a hundred set forth to outflank Lawrence from the 
north, but he decided to take a chance and hold his 


144 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


ground. A little later a train with two engines and 
two box-cars moved slowly up from Haret Ammar, 
machine-guns and rifles spitting lead from the roofs 
and from loopholes in the cars as the train advanced. 
As it passed, Lawrence touched his electric switch 
and exploded a mine directly under the second engine. 
The jar was sufficient to derail the first, demolish the 
boiler, as well as smash the cab and tender of the 
second, up-end the first box-car, and derail the second. 
While the Arabs swarmed around looting the wrecked 
train, Lawrence fired a box of guncotton under the 
front engine, completing its destruction. The box- 
cars were full of valuable baggage, and the Arabs 
went wild with joy. In all, seventy Turks were 
killed, ninety taken prisoner, and an Austrian lieu- 
tenant and thirteen Austrian and German sergeants 
blown up. 

Every fourth or fifth man of the famous fighting 
Howeitat tribe is a sheik. Naturally the head sheik 
has but little power. Frequently these men would 
accompany Lawrence on a raid. On one such ex- 
pedition to the railway near Biresh-Shediyah he had 
to adjudicate for them in twelve cases of assault with 
weapons, four camel-thefts, one marriage settlement, 
fourteen feuds, a bewitchment, and two cases of evil 
eye. He settled the bewitchment affair by counter- 
bewitching the hapless defendant. The evil eye cases 
he cleverly adjusted by sending the culprits away. 

On still another occasion, during the first week of 
the following October, Lawrence was sitting out in 


LAWRENCE THE TRAIN-WRECKER 145 


the open near Kilo 500. His Bedouin followers were 
concealed behind him in the broom-brush. Along 
came a heavy train with twelve coaches. The ex- 
plosion following the turning on of the electric cur- 
rent shattered the fire-box of the locomotive, burst 
many of the tubes, hurled the cylinders into the air, 
completely cleaned out the cab, including the engineer 
and fireman, warped the frame of the engine, bent the 
two rear driving-wheels, and broke their axles. 
When Lawrence put in his official report on this raid 
he humorously added a postscript to the effect that 
the locomotive was “beyond repair.” The tender 
and first coach were also demolished. Mazmi Bey, 
a general of the Turkish General Staff who happened 
to be on board, fired two shots out of the window of 
his private car with his Mauser pistol, which then 
evidently jammed. Although it appeared advisable 
for him to take to the camels and the distant hills, 
Lawrence and his band swooped down on the train, 
captured eight coaches, killed twenty Turks, and car- 
ried off seventy tons of food-stuffs without suffering 
any losses. 

His only European companion on some of his 
wildest train-blowing parties was a daring Australian 
machine-gunner, Sergeant Yells by name. He was 
a glutton for excitement and a tiger in a fight. On 
one occasion, when out with a raiding-party of Abu 
Tayi, Yells accounted for between thirty and forty 
_ Turks with his Lewis gun. When the loot was di- 
vided among the Bedouins, Yells, in true Australian 


146 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


fashion, insisted on having his share. So Lawrence 
handed him a Persian carpet and a fancy Turkish 
cavalry sword. 

Shereefs Ali and Abdullah also played an impor- 
tant part in the raids on the Hedjaz Railway and in 
the capture of great convoys of Turkish camels near 
Medina. In 1917 Lawrence and his associates, in 
cooperation with Feisal, Ali, Abdullah, and Zeid, 
blew up twenty-five Turkish trains, tore up fifteen 
thousand rails, and destroyed fifty-seven bridges and 
culverts. During the eighteen months that he led 
the Arabs, they dynamited seventy-nine trains and 
bridges! It is a remarkable fact that he participated 
in only one such expedition that turned out unsatis- 
factorily. General Allenby, in one of his reports, 
said that Colonel Lawrence had made train-wrecking 
the national sport of Arabia! 

Later in the campaign, near Deraa, the most im- 


portant railway-junction south of Damascus, Law- — 


rence touched off one of his tulips under the driving- 
wheels of a particularly long and heavily armed train. 
It turned out that Djemal Pasha, the commander- 
in-chief of the Turkish armies, was on board with 
nearly a thousand troops. Djemal hopped out of 
his saloon and, followed by all his staff, jumped into 
a ditch. 

Lawrence had less than sixty Bedouins with him, 
but all were members of his personal body-guard and 
famous fighters. In spite of the overwhelming odds, 
the young Englishman and his Arabs fought a 


LAWRENCE THE TRAIN-WRECKER 147 


pitched battle in which 125 Turks were killed and 
Lawrence lost a third of his own force. The remain- 
der of the Turks finally rallied around their com- 
mander-in-chief, and Lawrence and his Arabs had to 
show their heels. 

At every station along the Hedjaz-Pilgrim Rail- 
way were one or two bells which the Turkish officials 
rang as a warning to passengers when the train was 
ready to start. Nearly all of them now decorate the 
homes of Lawrence’s friends. Along with them are 
a dozen or more Turkish mile-posts and the number- 
plates from half the engines which formerly hauled 
trains over the line from Damascus to Medina. 
Lawrence and his associates collected these in order 
to confirm their victories. While in Arabia, I often 
heard the half-jocular, half-serious remark that Law- 
zence would capture a Turkish post merely for the 
sake of adding another bell to his collection; and it 
was no uncommon thing to see Lawrence, or one of 
his officers, walking stealthily along the railway em- 
bankment, between patrols, searching for the iron 
post marking Kilo 1000 south of Damascus. Once 
found, they would cut it off with a tulip-bud—a stick 
of dynamite. When not engaged in a major move- 
ment against the Turks or in mobilizing the Bedouins, 
Lawrence usually spent his time blowing up trains 
and demolishing track. 

So famous did this young archeologist become 
throughout the Near East as a dynamiter of bridges 
and trains that after the final defeat of the Turkish 


148 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


armies, when word reached Cairo that Lawrence 
would soon be passing through Egypt en route to 
Paris, General Watson, G. O. C. of troops, jocularly 
announced that he was going to detail a special de- 
tachment to guard Kasr el Nil, the Brooklyn Bridge 
of Egypt, which crosses the Nile from Cairo to the 
residential suburb of Gazireh. 

It had been rumored that Lawrence was dissatisfied 
at having finished up the campaign with the odd num- 
ber of seventy-nine mine-laying parties to his credit. 
So the story spread up and down along the route of 
the Milk and Honey Railway between Egypt and 
Palestine that he proposed to make it an even eighty 
and wind up his career as a dynamiter in an appro- 
priate manner by planting a few farewell tulips under 
the Kasr el Nil, just outside the door of the British 
military headquarters. 


CHAPTER XII 


DRINKERS OF THE MILK OF WAR 


' X YHILE Lawrence was traveling from 
sheik to sheik and from shereef to shereef, 
urging them, with the eloquence of all the 

desert dialects at his command, to join in the cam- 

paign against the Turks, squadrons of German aéro- 
planes were swarming down from Constantinople in 

a winged attempt to frighten the Arabian army with 

their strange devil-birds. But the Arabs refused to 

be intimidated. Instead, they insisted that their re- 
sourceful British leader should get them some “‘fight- 
ing swallows” too. 

Not long after a particularly obnoxious German 
air raid over Akaba, a royal courier galloped up to 
Lawrence’s tent on his racing dromedary. Without 
even waiting for his mount to kneel, he slid off the 
camel’s hump and delivered a scroll on which was 
inscribed the following: 


O faithful one! -Thy Government hath aéroplanes as the 
locusts. By the Grace of Allah I implore thee to ask thy 
King to despatch us a dozen or so. 

HussEIn. 


The people of Arabia are exceedingly ornate and 
149 


150 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


poetical in expressing themselves. They swear by 
the splendor of light and the silence of night and love 
to talk in imagery as rich as the colors in their Turk- 
oman prayer-rugs. 

An American typewriting concern startled some 
people by advertising that more people use the Arabic 
alphabet than use either Roman or Chinese characters. 
They are very proud of their language and call it the 
language of the angels; they believe it is spoken in 
heaven. It is one of the most difficult languages in 
the world to master. According to our way of think- 
ing the Arabs begin at the end of a sentence and 
write backward. They have 450 words meaning 
“line,” 822 words meaning “camel,” and 1037 words 
meaning “sword.” Their language is full of color. 
They call a hobo “a son of the road,” and a jackal “a 
son of howling.” Arab despatch writers penned 
their accounts in picturesque vein. “The fighting 
was worth seeing,” wrote Emir Abdullah to Colonel 
Lawrence. “The armed locomotives were escaping 
with the coaches of the train like a serpent beaten on 
the head.” 

Inspired by a squadron of antiquated bombing and 
reconnaissance planes which Lawrence had brought 
down from Egypt, the Arabs won an important vic- 
tory over the Turks in the desert just south of the 
Dead Sea. Thereupon the commander of the Ara- 
bian army sent this message to King George: 


To His Majesty the King of England. 


DRINKERS OF MILK OF WAR 151 


Our victorious troops have captured one of the enemy’s 
divisions near Tafileh. The truth follows by post. 
FEIsAu. 


Another Arab chieftain in writing an account of an 
engagement said: 


I sallied forth with my people, drinkers of the milk of 
war. ‘The enemy advanced to meet us, but Allah was not 
with them. 


During the war the British Government ran tele- 
phone and telegraph wires from Jeddah on the Red 
Sea to the king’s palace in the Forbidden City. The 
lines were strung by Mohammedans from Egypt, not 
by Christians.. In spite of his abhorrence of all 
modern inventions, the king permitted the installation 
merely because he realized the urgent importance of 
being able to keep in touch with his Allies. As he 
insisted on living in the Forbidden City, the telephone 
and telegraph were a military necessity. There are 
about twenty branch ’phones on this official telephone 
system. One day a British general telephoned to 
his Majesty from Jeddah to discuss some urgent 
military and political question with him. In the mid- 
dle of the conversation the king overheard other voices 
on the line and shouted angrily down the wire to the 
exchange: “I command thee to cut off every tele- 
phone in the Hedjaz for one hour! It is I, the king, 
who speaks.” And so it came to pass that the en- 
tire Arabian telephone system was tied up by a royal 


152 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


command. If you ever happen to be in Arabia and 
want to telephone to King Hussein, “Calif of Islam 
and commander of the Faithful,” all you have to do 
is to ask Central to give you “Mecca Number One.” 

Shortly after the capture of Jeddah, Lawrence, in 
company with Colonel C. EK. Wilson, the governor of 
Port Sudan, Mr. Ronald Storrs, and Emir Abdullah, 
for their amusement, made the Turkish band which 
they had captured a few days before play “Deutsch- 
land, Deutschland tiber Alles,’ “The Hymn of 
Hate,” and other German songs. The king hap- 
pened to ring up in the middle of the concert. Hear- 
ing the medley of discord he requested that the re- 
ceiver be left down, and for half an hour he sat in his 
palace in Mecca chuckling with glee while the band 
did its worst. 

The British aviators who came down to Arabia not 
only had to wear Arab head-dress, but they had to 
fly at a considerable height to avoid being shot at by 
the Bedouins, who have an irresistible desire to shoot 
anything that is moving fast. ‘They peppered an ar- 
mored car on one occasion and then sent around pro- 
fuse apologies. They admitted they knew it was a 
friendly machine but said it was going so fast they 
simply could not resist the temptation to see if they 
could hit it. 

Colonel Lawrence and his associates introduced the 
first motor-cars into Holy Arabia, and Emir Feisal 
used a one-ton truck as his royal limousine. I went 
‘with him on one of his journeys from Akaba to the 


DRINKERS OF MILK OF WAR 153 


front line outposts at Waheida in the desert, north of 
the Turkish stronghold at Maan on the Hedjaz Rail- 
way. We camped for the day on the summit of a 
high hill amid the ruins of an old Turkish fortress. 
That noon Feisal gave a dinner in our honor. We 
sat around on empty boxes instead of squatting on 
the ground Arab fashion, and a table was improvised 
for our special benefit. ‘The others present were 
General Nuri Pasha, Malud Bey, and old Auda Abu 
Tayi. Before the meal they served us with cups of 
sweetened tea. Then for dinner a great plate of 
rice crowned with chunks of lamb and goat was placed 
in the center of the table. Besides this there was an- 
other dish of rice mixed with pieces of meat. Beans 
with tomato sauce, lentils and peas, pomegranates, 
dried dates and figs, and a sort of candy made from 
sesame seed and sugar, resembling raw asbestos, 
heaped the groaning banquet board. For dessert we 
were to have had a tin of California pears; they had 
been sent down from Egypt as a gift for the Emir. 
Old Auda Abu Tayi had never seen such delicious- 
looking pears in his life, and the temptation to sample 
them so sorely tried his patience that he was unable to 
await the end of the meal. Disregarding the food be- 
fore him, and throwing formality to the winds, he 
attacked them at once and devoured all of them before 
the rest of us were through with the first course! At 
the end of the meal small cups of coffee flavored with 
cardamom, an Indian seed with a minty taste, were 
served to us, and a bowl of water was solemnly passed 


154 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


around in order that we might remove remnants of 
gravy still lingering in our beards. Then the emir’s 
Abyssinian slaves brought cigarettes, and we strolled 
out with our field-glasses to watch the battle in prog- 
ress a few miles distant in the hollow of the land 
around Maan. 

Both before and after lunch scores of Arabs filed 
into the tent to kiss Feisal’s hand. He never allowed 
them to touch it with their lips, but pulled it away 
just before they had an opportunity to kiss it, to show 
them how reluctant he was to be treated with special 
deference. 

Both Feisal and Lawrence owed much of their 
authoritative leadership to their recognition of the 
traditional independence of the tribes. The gallant 
old brigands who had roamed freely all their lives 
over the vast stretches of Arabia, making little pri- 
vate wars of their own, were not to be commanded or 
conscripted; they had to be gently cajoled into the 
bigger war and made to feel the sense of their own 
importance. 








““DRINKERS OF THE MILK OF WAR” 





SUNSET OVER THE MOUNTAIN OF EDOM 





OUR CARAVAN APPROACHING THE “‘LOST CITY” 


CHAPTER XIII 


AUDA ABU TAYI, THE BEDOUIN ROBIN HOOD 


oF Y the grace of Allah, I, Auda Abu Tayi, warn 
you to quit Arabia before the end of Rama- 


dan. We Arabs want this country to our- 
selves. Unless this is done, by the beard of the 
Prophet, I declare you proscribed, outlawed, and fair 
game for any one to kill.” 

This was the official and personal declaration of 
war issued by Auda Abu Tayi, the Howeitat chief- 
tain, the greatest popular hero of modern Arabian 
history, the most celebrated fighting man the desert 
has produced in four generations. The proclamation 
was addressed to the sultan of Turkey, to Djemal 
Pasha, the viceroy of Syria, Palestine, and Arabia, 
and to the mutesarif of Kerak, who was the Ottoman 
governor of the important district on the edge of the 
desert near the southern end of the Dead Sea where 
Auda lived. The Arabian revolution appealed to 
the Bedouin Robin Hood, largely because it fur- 
nished him with an ideal excuse to declare personal 
war against the Turkish government. 

When Auda heard that Shereef Hussein had 
started a revolt against the Turks, he and his fearless 


Howeitat followers jumped into their saddles, gal- 
155 


156 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


loped across the desert sands to Feisal’s headquarters, 
and swore on the Koran that they would make the 
shereef’s enemies their enemies. ‘Then they all sat 
down to a banquet in honor of the occasion. Sud- 
denly old Auda uttered a potent Moslem oath and 
reminded himself and his friends that he was wearing 
a set of Turkish false teeth. Cursing the Turkish 
dentist who had made them, he dashed out of the tent 
and smashed them on a rock. For two months he 
was in agony and could eat only milk and boiled rice. 
When Lawrence came down from Egypt, Auda’s 
mouth was giving him so much trouble that he had to 
send to Cairo for a British dentist to make the old 
brigand a special set of Allied teeth! 

His undying loyalty and friendship proved a most 
valuable asset to Hussein and the Allies in the Ara- 
bian campaign. Besides, he offered his rich and rare 
experience in the kind of warfare suitable to his coun- 
try. With the exception of Lawrence, he has been 
the greatest raider of modern Arabia. During the 
last seventeen years he has killed seventy-five men in 
hand-to-hand combat; all of them Arabs, for he does 
not include Turks in his game-book. I do not think 
that his claim is far wrong, for he has been wounded 
twenty-two times and in his battles has seen all his 
tribesmen hurt and most of his relatives killed. His 
right arm is so stiff that he can’t scratch himself and 
has to use a camel-stick. Although the Howeitat 
territory is situated inland near the Gulf of Akaba, 
Auda has led expeditions six hundred miles south to 





AUDA ABU TAYI 157 


Mecca, north as far as Aleppo, and a thousand miles 
east to Bagdad and Basra. Occasionally the tables 
are turned on him. One year while he was leading 
an expedition against Ibn Saud, the ruler of Central 
Arabia, the Druses came down from Jebel Hauran, 
in the hills south of Damascus, and spirited away all 
his camels. Auda took his loss calmly and philosoph- 
ically, but word of his misfortune reached the ears of 
his friend, Nuri Shalaan, emir of Jauf, ruler of 
North Central Arabia. In accordance with one of 
the unwritten laws of the desert, Nuri Shalaan im- 
mediately sent Auda half of all his possessions. 

Old Auda prides himself on being the quintessence 
of Arabian tradition. A hundred successful raids 
have taken him from his home near the Dead Sea to 
all parts of the Arabian world. His loot he dispenses 
in staggering hospitality. He talks long, loud, and 
abundantly in a voice like a mountain torrent. 

Although Auda has probably captured more loot 
on his raids than any other Bedouin chieftain, he is a 
comparatively poor man as the result of his lavish 
hospitality. The profits of a hundred successful 
raids have provided entertainment for his friends. 
One of his few remaining evidences of transitory 
wealth is an enormous copper kettle around which 
twenty-five people can gather at a meal. His hos- 
pitality is sometimes very inconvenient except to 
guests in the last stages of starvation. One day, 
when he was helping me to a heaped portion of rice 
and mutton from the copper kettle, I was discussing 


158 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


the subject of camels with him and mentioned the 
fact that we had none in my country except in the 
zoos. ‘The old Bedouin could n’t understand this 
and insisted on presenting me with twenty of his prize 
dromedaries to take back to America to start a camel 
industry. It required all Lawrence’s persuasive elo- 
quence to convince him that it was impossible for me 
to accept the regal gift on account of the difficulty 
of transporting his camels half-way around the world. 

In May, 1918, the Turks sent a large number of 
camels down from Syria. ‘They put them into an 
impromptu corral at Maan railway station. Auda 
heard of this, and at the head of a small party of 
twelve of his tribesmen he dashed boldly into Maan. 
There were thousands of Turkish soldiers all around, 
but before they realized what had occurred Auda had 
rounded up twenty-five of the camels and had driven 
them off at a twenty-five-mile-an-hour gallop. He 
was full of such pranks as this and recounted his ad- 
ventures afterward with great gusto. 

One of the most amazing bits of brigandage in 
Auda’s long and lurid career was when he held up 
his intimate friend and prince. Feisal was on his way 
across the desert on an expedition and had four thou- 
sand pounds in gold coin. Unluckily his route lay 
through Auda’s country, and somehow the latter got 
to know about the treasure. So he insisted that 
Feisal and retinue remain as his guests until they had 
given the old pirate three thousand out of the four 


thousand sovereigns. Auda, of course, did not use 


AUDA ABU TAYI 159 


force; he merely intimated that he was entitled to the 
gold! 

Auda Abu Tayi is a handsome old chieftain, a pure 
desert type. He is tall, straight, and powerful, and, 
although sixty years of age, as active and sinewy as . 
a cougar. His lined and haggard face is pure 
Bedouin. He has a broad, low forehead, high, sharp, 
hooked nose, greenish brown eyes inclined to slant 
outward, black pointed beard, and mustache tinged 
with gray. The name “Auda” means “Father of 
Flying,” which recalls the day on which he made his 
first aéroplane flight. Instead of showing any fear 
he urged the pilot, Captain Furness- Williams, to take 
him higher and higher. 

The old hero is as hard-headed as he is hot-headed. 
He receives advice, criticism, or abuse with a smile as 
constant as it is charming, but nothing on earth would 
make him change his mind or obey an order or follow 
a course of which he disapproves. He is modest, 
simple as a child, honest, kind-hearted and affection- 
ate, and warmly loved even by those to whom he is 
most trying—his friends. His hobby is to concoct 
fantastic tales about himself and to relate fictitious 
but humorously horrible stories concerning the pri- 
vate life of his host or guests. He takes wild delight 
in making his friends uncomfortable. One time he 
strolled into the tent of his cousin, Mohammed, and 
roared out for the benefit of all present how villain- 
ously his kinsman had behaved at Kl Wejh. He told 
how Mohammed had bought a beautiful necklace for 


160 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


one of his wives. But, alas, Mohammed met a 
strange woman, a very beautiful strange woman in 
El Wejh who was as fascinating as starlight, and, 
succumbing to her charms, he presented her with the 
necklace. It was a wonderful necklace with gems 
that sparkled as the stars, with blues that recalled the 
seas and reds of desert sunsets. Most eloquently 
Auda discoursed on the lady’s charms. On the other 
side of the partition the women of Mohammed’s 
household heard of their lord and master’s perfidy. 
Although the tale was mischievously fabricated, there 
was a great commotion in the household of Moham- 
med, and his life was made unbearable for several 
weeks. 

Auda’s home is on a mud flat eighty miles east of 
Akaba. During his association with Lawrence in the 
Arabian campaign, he picked up many interesting 
details of life in Europe. His eyes sparkled at tales 
of hotels and cabarets and palaces, and he was sud- 
denly fired with the determination to abandon his 
tent for a house as splendid as any Sidi Lawrence had 
known in London. 

The first problem that confronted him was the 
question of labor. This was solved by raiding a 
Turkish garrison and taking fifty prisoners, whom he 
put to work digging wells. After he had finished 
that job, he promised them their liberty if they would 
build him a beautiful house. They constructed one 
with forty rooms and four towers, but on account of 
the scarcity of timber in the desert, no one could 


AUDA ABU TAYT. 161 


figure out how to roof such an enormous building. 
Auda, keen as a steel trap, immediately worked out 
a plan. Summoning his warriors, he started out 
across the sands to the Pilgrim’s Railway, over- 
powered the passing Turkish patrol, and carried off 
thirty telegraph-poles, which now form the frame- 
work of his desert palace. 

Even a forty-room palace is none too large for 
Auda, who has not been strictly abstemious in his 
nuptial aspirations. In fact he is noted through- 
out Arabia for his reckless polygamy. Every 
Mohammedan is permitted to have four wives at one 
time—if he can support them. Old Auda has been 
married twenty-eight times and is ambitious to raise 
that record to fifty before he dies. But in spite of 
his numerous marriages he has only one son living. 
All the others have been killed in raids and feuds. 
Young Mohammed Abu Tayi was eleven years old 
when I saw him, but so undersized that his father 
could pick him up by the scruff of the neck and swing 
him into the saddle on his camel with one hand. 
When the caravan was on the march at night, his 
father, afraid that Mohammed when asleep would 
fall off the camel, often picked him up and stuffed 
him into one of his own saddle-bags, where the boy 
would spend the night. The youngster fought be- 
side his father and Colonel Lawrence through the 
whole Arabian campaign. 

Auda’s enthusiasm in making the Turks his ene- 
mies to the nth power—pouring into the cause all the 


162 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


hatred he had reserved for personal feuds—brought 
many of the tribes to Lawrence’s personal standard. 
Lawrence once remarked that Auda was somewhat 
like Cesar in his ability to keep around him a free 
country of faithful friends, and around that a great 
ring of enemies. Even the renowned Nuri Shalaan, 
as well as many other powerful chiefs friendly to 
Auda, were in constant terror lest they should offend 
him. 

The Howeitat tribe was formerly under the control 
of Ibn Rashid and his tribe, which long roamed the 
North Arabian Desert. Later, under the leadership 
of Ibn Jazi, the tribe broke up into discordant 
sections. The Abu Tayi subsection is the joint work 
of Auda, the fighting man, and Mohammed el 
Dheilan, the thinker. Ibn Jazi mistreated a Sherari 
guest of Auda’s, and the proud and hospitable chief 
was infuriated. In the fifteen-year feud that 
followed, Annad, Auda’s eldest son and the pride of 
his heart, was killed. ‘This feud between the two 
sections of the Howeitat was one of Feisal’s greatest 
difficulties in the operations around Akaba and Maan. 
It drove Hamed el Arar, the Ibn Jazi leader of to- 
day, into the arms of the Turks, while Saheiman Abu 
Tayi and the rest of the subtribe went to El Wejh 
to join Lawrence and Feisal. Auda: made peace 
with his sworn enemies at the request of Feisal, and 
it was the hardest thing the old man ever had to do 
in his life. The death of Annad killed all his hopes 
and ambitions for the Abu Tayi and has made his life 


AUDA ABU TAYI 163 


seem a bitter failure. But Feisal ruled that his 
followers were to have no more blood-feuds and no 
Arab enemies except the adherents of Ibn Rashid in 
North Arabia, who have carried on perpetual and 
bitter warfare with all the other tribes of the desert. 
Feisal’s success in burying the innumerable hatchets 
of the Hedjaz is pregnant with promise. In all 
Arab minds a shereef now stands above tribes, men, 
sheiks and tribal jealousies. A shereef now exercises 
the prestige of peacemaker and independent 
authority, 


CHAPTER XIV 


KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK TENTS 


chief figure of the Abu Tayi. He is taller 

than his cousin and massively built; a square- 
headed thoughtful man of forty-five, with a melan- 
choly humor and a kind heart carefully concealed be- 
neath it. He acts as master of ceremonies for the 
Abu Tayi, is Auda’s right-hand man, and frequently 
appears as his spokesman. Mohammed is greedy, 
richer than Auda, deeper and more calculating. 
Allah has endowed him with the eloquence of an 
Arabian Demosthenes; his tribesmen address him 
as “Father of Eloquence.” In a tribal council he 
can always be relied upon to persuade his audience 
to accept his views. He can wield a sword right 
lustily too, and is “a drinker of the milk of war” 
second only in prowess to the mighty Auda. 

Zaal Ion Motlog is Auda’s nephew. He is twenty- 
five, something of a dandy, with polished teeth, care- 
fully curled mustache, and a trimmed and pointed 
beard. He, too, is greedy and sharp-witted but 
without Mohammed’s mentality. Auda has been 


training him for years as chief scout to the tribe, so 
, 164 


FTER Auda, Mohammed el Dheilan is the 





KNIGHTS OF BLACK TENTS | 165 


that he is a most daring and acceptable commander in 
a ghazu. 

Nuri Shalaan, emir of Jauf, is not such a pictur- 
esque character as his friend and kinsman, Auda Abu 
Tayi, but as ruler of the Rualla Anazeh tribe, two 
hundred thousand strong, the largest single tribe in 
the desert, occupying nearly all the territory between 
Damascus and Bagdad, he is one of the great men 
of Arabia. His friendship was most vital to Hussein 
and Lawrence in the taking of Deraa and Damascus, 
and might have been of tremendous weight to Feisal 
now that he has been placed on the throne of Meso- 
potamia had he not sold himself to the French in 
Syria in 1919, after the war. Lawrence would not 
Jet Nuri declare war on the Turks until the last 
minute, because Nuri’s allegiance would have meant 
too many mouths to feed. Nuri Shalaan was the 
deadly enemy of Ibn Rashid, who codperated with 
the Turks, but who since the Great War has lost 
his portion of Arabia to Sultan Ibn Saud of Nejd. 
At one time Nuri Shalaan wanted an armorer. He 
captured Ibn Bani of Hail, Ibn Rashid’s armorer, 
the most skilled man of his craft in Arabia, and put 
him in prison with his own smith, Ibn Zarih. He 
gave them both forges and tools and declared that 
they should languish in prison until Ibn Zarih could 
make swords and daggers that could not be dis- 
tinguished from those of Ibn Bani. They sweated 
and worked and the forges were kept burning until 
late every night, and finally, after many weeks, Ibn 


166 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Zarih produced a wonderful dagger with an edge 
that could almost cut the wind. Nuri was satisfied; 
he released his two prisoners and sent Ibn Bani back 
to his country with rich presents. Nuri Shalaan was 
an old man of seventy when the Arab revolution 
broke out. He was always ambitious and determined 
to be a leader. ‘Thirty years ago he killed his two 
brothers and made himself chief of the tribe. He 
ruled his people with a rod of iron, and they were 
practically the only Bedouins who obeyed orders. 
If they fail him he has their heads cut off; but in 
spite of his cruelty his followers all admire and are 
proud of him. Most Arab sheiks talk like magpies, 
but Nuri remains silent in the tribal council and 
settles everything with a few final clean-cut words of 
decision. Until the end of the war he had pre- 
ferred tent life to that of all the palaces from Bagdad 
to the Bosporus, and kept great state in the largest 
black goat’s-hair tent in the desert, where sheep were 
slaughtered every few minutes for the endless stream 
of guests. He owned the best wheat land in Syria 
and the finest camels and horses. He is so rich he 
does not know how to measure his wealth. 

Motlog Ibn Jemiann, sheik of the Beni Atiyeh, 
south of Maan, added four thousand fighting men to 
King Hussein’s forces. He is hard-working and 
brave asa lion. He helped Lawrence blow up trains 
near Maan and was in the thick of the fray when- 
ever there were railway stations to be captured or any 
other little jobs of a particularly dangerous nature. 





KNIGHTS OF BLACK TENTS _ 167 


During the scouting around Maan, two of 
Lawrence’s officers were trying to find an ancient 
Roman road in the desert. Motlog, always eager 
for adventure, went with them. In the deep sand 
their Ford careened madly from left to right and then 
at one point swerved so sharply that Motlog was 
thrown on his head. The officers jumped out of the 
car and ran back to pick him up and apologize to 
him, thinking he would be very angry. But the old 
sheik brushed off the sand and said ruefully, “Please 
don’t be offended with me; I have n’t learnt to ride 
one of these things yet.’ He regarded riding in a 
motor-car as an art that had to be mastered just like 
riding a camel. 

The Robber Harith Clan may not have been in 
the good graces of Hussein before the war, but their 
shereef, Ali Ibn Hussein, a youth of ‘nineteen, was 
responsible for converting nearly the whole of the 
Hauran to the revolt. He was the most reckless, 
most impertinent, and jolliest fellow in the Arabian 
army. ‘The fastest runner in the desert, he could 
catch up with a camel in his bare feet and swing into 
the saddle with one hand while holding his rifle with 
the other. When Ali went into battle he took off 
all his clothing except his drawers. He said it was 
the cleanest way to get wounded. He had a wild 
sense of humor and made jokes about the king in his 
presence. He was one of the two shereefs in the 
‘Hedjaz who did not stand in terror of King Hussein. 

The other was Shereef Shakr, a cousin of Feisal 


168 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


and the richest man in the Hedjaz. He was the only 
big shereef who plaited his hair, and, in addition, he 
encouraged lice in it, to show his respect for the old 
Bedouin proverb, “A well-populated head is a sign 
of a generous mind.” His home was in Mecca, but 
he spent most of his time in the saddle with the 
Bedouin tribesmen. 

These are a few of the leading chieftains, in some 
of whom enthusiasm for Arabian nationalism had 
to be kindled, others cajoled by appeals to their 
vanity, and almost all inflamed with the zest for war 
on a big scale—the game they had known and played 
at from childhood. When they had once sworn 
allegiance they were as true as steel. Without their 
loyalty and dauntless courage and epic love of blood- 
curdling adventure the Arabian campaign would have 
been a dream on paper fabricated by an impractical 
young archeologist. 

In his dealings with Auda and other Arab chiefs, 
Lawrence found their rich sgnse of humor an impor- 
tant asset. Make an Arab laugh, and you can per- 
suade him to do most things. Arabic is a solemn 
language, full of ceremony and stateliness; and Law- 
rence, who had an unusual knowledge of the various 
dialects spoken in Arabia, made the discovery that 
the direct translation into Arabic of ordinary collo- 
quial English, spiced with wit, delighted his hearers. 
Another highly useful weapon in Colonel Lawrence’s 
mental armory was the faculty of mastering the un- 
expected with some inspired improvisation. Time 





KNIGHTS OF BLACK TENTS 169 


and again he happened upon a desperate situation 
from which there was no obvious means of escape. 
In the space of a few seconds his alert brain would 
work out some seemingly fantastic but really brilliant 
method of dealing with the emergency. 

Such an incident was one of his many adventures 
in the Syrian Desert. He was at the town of Azrak 
among the shifting sand-dunes southeast of Damas- 
cus, when a courier brought news that some Turk- 
ish spies were in a caravan of Syrian merchants which 
was on its way to the Arabian army supply-base at 
Akaba, three hundred miles to the south. He imme- 
diately decided that in order to draw the teeth of the 
spies he must reach Akaba either in company with the 
caravan or soon after its arrival. Normally the 
journey from Azrak to Akaba is twelve days by 
camel, and already the Syrian caravan had a start of 
nine days. 

Realizing that his followers could not stand the 
forced pace at which he meant to travel, Lawrence 
took with him but one man—a half-breed Haurani— 
who was famous in the North Arabian Desert for his 
endurance. The pair were racing over the ridges be- 
tween Azrak and Bair, eighty: miles south of the camp 
from which they started, when suddenly a dozen 
Arabs appeared over the edge of a sand-dune and 
galloped their camels down the slope to cut off the 
strangers. As they approached, the Arabs shouted a 
request that Lawrence and his companion should dis- 
mount, and at the same time announced themselves 


170 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


as friends and members of the Jazi- Howeitat tribe. 
When only thirty yards away they themselves dis- 
mounted by way of encouraging the lone couple to do 
likewise. But Lawrence had recognized the Arabs 
as of the Beni-Sakr, allies of the Turks and blood- 
enemies of most of the Bedouin tribes that were fight- 
ing for King Hussein and Emir Feisal. It was 
known to the Beni-Sakr that gold passed up and 
down the caravan route, and they were out looking 
for loot. 

This particular sector was the only war-time trade- 
route between Syria and Arabia, along which the 
merchants of Syria had for many months journeyed 
to Akaba for the purchase of Manchester cotton. 
Lawrence used cotton both as an aid to propaganda 
and as a means of getting as much gold as possible 
from Syria and Turkey. The Ottoman Empire 
needed cotton urgently, and for this reason the mili- 
tary authorities allowed traders to pass back and 
forth through the lines. When they reached Akaba, 
Lawrence and the Arab leaders would make converts 
among them by preaching Arab Nationalistic doc- 
trines. At the same time they would collect much 
valuable information regarding conditions in Turkey. 
The merchants were also useful in smuggling down 
to Akaba German field-glasses which Lawrence 
needed for the equipment of his desert troops. 

Meanwhile, the dismounted marauders of the Beni- 
Sakr stood on the sand and fingered their rifles ex- 
pectantly, while still passing friendly greetings. Of 


KNIGHTS OF BLACK TENTS 171 


a sudden Lawrence grinned so genially that they be- 
came mystified. 

“Come near; I want to whisper something to you,” 
he said to their leader. Then bending down from 
the saddle of his camel he asked, “Do you know what 
your name is?” 

The sheik looked speechless and rather amazed. 
Lawrence continued, “I think it must be “Terrace’ 
(Procurer) !” 

This is the most terrible insult that one can offer a 
Bedouin. The Beni-Sakr leader was dumfounded 
and rather nervous. He could not understand how 
an ordinary traveler would dare to say such a thing 
to him in the open desert when numbers and arms 
were on his side. Before the sheik had time to re- 
cover himself, Lawrence remarked pleasantly: 

“May Allah give you peace!” 

Quietly telling the Haurani to come along, he 
swung off across the sand. ‘The men of Beni-Sakr 
remained half bewildered until the pair had ridden 
about a hundred yards. ‘Then they recovered their 
senses and began shooting; but the blond Prince of 
Mecca galloped over, the nearest ridge and escaped. 
Bullets, by the way, have but little immediate effect 
on a camel that is traveling at twenty miles an hour. 

Both Lawrence and his Haurani nearly killed their 
camels during the journey. ‘They rode on an aver- 
age of twenty-two hours a day. From dawn to set- 
ting sun they crossed the burning sands, only stop- 
ping then for a moment’s rest for their camels. 


172 WITH LAWRENC™ IN ARABIA 


When they reached Auda Abu Tayr’s country, east 
of the southern end of the Dead Sea, they exchanged 
their mounts for fresh beasts. 'They covered the 
whole distance of three hundred miles in just three 
days, a record for fast camel trekking that should 
stand for many years. 

This weird adventure was but one of a hundred 
that befell Lawrence. I heard of another which ex- 
plains why he always carried a Colt revolver of an 
early frontier model. 

Some years ago, while wandering in Asia Minor, 
near Marash, a fever came upon him, and he made 
for Birgik, the nearest village. He happened to 
meet a Turkoman. ‘They are a semi-nomadic crowd 
of Mongol descent, men with crooked eyes and faces 
that look as though they had been modeled in butter 
and then left out in the sun. He was not quite sure 
of his directions and asked the Turkoman to point out 
the way. The reply was, “Right across those low 
hills to the left.””. As Lawrence turned away from 
him the Mongol sprang on his back, and they had a 
bit of a dog-fight on the ground for a few minutes. 
But Lawrence had walked more than a thousand 
miles and, apart from the fever, was nearly done up. 
Soon he found himself underneath. 

“He sat on my stomach, pulled out my colt,” said 
Lawrence, “pressed it to my temple, and pulled the 
trigger many times. But the safety-catch was on. 
The 'Turkoman was a primitive fellow and knew very 
little about revolver mechanism. He threw the 





KNIGHTS OF BLACK TENTS 178 


weapon away in disgust and proceeded to pound my 
head with a rock until I was no longer interested. 
After taking everything I had, he made off. I went 
to the village and got the inhabitants to help me chase 
the scoundrel. We caught him and made him dis- 
gorge the things he’d relieved me of. Since then 
I’ve always had a profound respect for a Colt, and 
have never been without one.” 


CHAPTER XV 


MY LORD THE CAMEL 


} | O knowledge that could increase his influence 
_ over the peoples of Arabia was neglected by 
Lawrence. He even made a minute study 
of that beast of mystery, the camel, the character and 
quality of which few Arabs are altogether familiar 
with, although it plays such an all-important part in 
their lives. Lawrence is the only European I have 
ever met who possesses “camel instinct’”—a quality 
that implies intimate acquaintance with the beast’s 
habits, powers, and innumerable idiosyncrasies. 
Auda Abu Tayi, the Bedouin Robin Hood, had this 
instinct developed to an unusually high degree. 
There are six different species of camels found in 
Central Arabia, from whence come the finest breeds. 
The Bedouin call their country “the Mother of the 
Camel.” Arabian camels have but one hump; in fact, 
most of the Arabs have never even heard of the two- 
humped variety, which is found only in Central Asia, 
to the northwest of Persia, chiefly in the Gobi Desert. 
The two-humped breed is slow and of little use except 
as a beast of burden. The one-humped camel is the 
dromedary, which is the Greek word for a camel that 


runs. 
174 





MY LORD THE CAMEL 175 


The chief unit of wealth in Arabia is the camel. A 
man is not spoken of as owning so many apartment- 
houses or country estates, but as owning so many 
gamels. From biblical down to modern times, wars 
have been waged in‘the desert for the possession of 
camels. One tribe will swoop down upon another 
and steal all its camels; then that tribe will mount its 
horses, dash across the desert, and drive off all the 
camels of another tribe. So, in the course of twelve 
months, one camel may become the stolen property 
of half a dozen different tribes. The very existence 
of human life in the desert depends upon the camel. 
The Arabs use it not only as a beast of burden; they 
drink its milk and use its hair for making cloth, and 
when it becomes old they kill it and use its flesh for 
food. Camel steak in Arabia is regarded much as 
blubber is among the Eskimos, but the average Euro- 
pean would prefer to worry along on caviar and paté 
de foie gras. 

The camel is practically the only animal that can 
exist on the scant vegetation of the desert. Its teeth 
are so long that it can chew cactus without the thorns 
pricking either its lips or the roof of its mouth. Al- 
though camels can go for long periods without water, 
when they do drink they more than make up for lost 
time. It takes a half-hour to water them, but each 
camel can accommodate a nice little swallow of 
twenty gallons. It is very irritating when suffering 
from thirst in the desert to hear your camel drawing 
on. the copious reserve of water inside its body. At 


176 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


such times the Arabs, when in dire straits, will kill a 
camel and drink the water in its stomach. ‘The water 
is of a greenish color and has a greenish taste, but one 
can’t be too fastidious when perishing from thirst. 
In judging a camel, some of the many things to be 
considered are the length of the inside of the belly, 
the way the beast lifts its feet, the way it carries its 
head, the depth of the neck, the length of the front 
leg, the length of the front and back shoulders, and 
the girth and shape of the hump. A very long leg 
is particularly desirable, as is a small circumference 
around the waist. A camel should be neither too fat 
nor too thin. The hump, which shouid be of hard, 
fatless muscle, is of paramount importance. The 
dromedary actually seems to live on its hump, and if 
it be worked too hard the hump gradually disappears. 
If it has no hump, or a low one or a thin one or a fat 
one, the animal is of little value and will break down 
in a short time. Age is judged by the teeth, as with 
the horse. Camels usually live for about twenty-five 
years, being in their prime between the ages of four 
and fourteen. Over good ground first-class Arabian 
dromedaries can trot up to twenty-one miles an hour, 
canter up to twenty-eight miles an hour, and gallop 
up to thirty-two with their legs going like huge pis- 
tons. For a whole day’s travel, however, the most 
desirable pace is a jog-trot of seven miles an hour. 
The ordinary speed for a long journey of many days 
across the desert is only about four and a half miles 
an hour; and if the journey extends over hundreds of 





MY LORD THE CAMEL 177 


miles, it is advisable always to keep the camel at a 
walk. Lawrence’s feat in making a forced trek of 
three hundred miles in three days was therefore 
looked upon by his followers as almost a miracle. A 
good camel makes absolutely no sound when it walks; 
a trait which is of great assistance both to the Be- 
douins during their night raids and to desert traders 
who fear assault. The Arab teaches his mount 
not to whine, and a whole caravan may pass within 
twenty yards of a tent without being heard by the 
occupants. 

The winter of 1917-18 was a severe one for the 
camels. Lawrence’s army was at Tafileh in January, 
at an altitude of five thousand feet. The snow 
drifted to a depth of four feet, impassable for the 
camels unless their riders dismounted and dug a path 
with their hands. Many of them, both camels and 
Arabs, perished from the cold. 

Lawrence sent a request to headquarters, Cairo, for 
heavy clothing and boots for his men. Instead of re- 
ceiving them, he got a wireless message telling him 
that Arabia was a “tropical country”’! 

One morning an Arab column awoke on a hillside 
to find that snow had drifted over their crouching 
camels. They dug them out with the iron spoons 
which are used for roasting coffee-beans, but all were 
dead. Lawrence and his men had to walk barefoot 
through the snow for miles before they reached a 
military encampment. Another time thirty-four 
men started from Akaba for Tafileh on camels, and 


178 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


only one man succeeded in getting through alive. 
The Arab army had plenty of camels at this time, 
thanks, partly, to Prince Zeid. Some months pre- 
vious the Turks had sent a large caravan of supplies 
toward Medina from Hail, Ibn Rashid’s capital in 
Central Arabia. Zeid and his men surprised it at 
Hanakieh, killed thirty Turks, captured two hundred 
and fifty more and also three thousand camels, two 
thousand sheep, four mountain-guns, and several 
thousand rifles. 

Although “the camel is an intricate animal and 
calls for skilled labor in the handling, ” according to 
Colonel Lawrence, “she yields a remarkable return. 
We had no system of supply: each man was self-con- 
tained and carried on the saddle from the sea-base, at 
which the raid started, six weeks’ food for himself. 
The six weeks’ ration for ordinary men was a half- 
bag of flour, forty-five pounds in weight. Luxuri- 
ous feeders carried some rice also for variety. Hach 
man baked for himself, kneading his own flour into 
unleavened cakes and warming it in the ashes of a 
fire. We carried about a pint of drinking-water 
each, since the camels required to come to water on 
the average every three days, and there was no ad- 
vantage in our being richer than our mounts. Some 
of us never drank between wells, but those were 
hardy men; most of us drank a lot at each well, and 
had a drink during the intermediate dry day. In the 
heat of summer Arabian camels will do about two 
hundred and fifty miles comfortably between drinks: 


MY LORD THE CAMEL 179 


and this represents about three days’ vigorous 
marching. 

“The country is not so dry as it is painted, and this 
radius was always more than we needed. Wells are 
seldom more than one hundred miles apart. An easy 
day’s march was fifty miles: an emergency march 
might be up to one hundred and ten miles in a day. 

“The six weeks’ food gave us a range of over a 
thousand miles out and home; and that (like the pint 
of water) was more than ever we needed, even in so 
large a country as Arabia. It was possible (for me, 
the camel novice in the army, ‘painful’ was a better 
word) to ride fifteen hundred miles in a month with- 
out revictualing; and there was never a fear of star- 
vation, for each of us was riding on two hundred 
pounds of potential meat, and when food lacked we 
would stop and eat the weakest of our camels. Ex- 
hausted camel is poor food, but cheaper killing than a 
fat one; and we had to remember that our future 
efficiency depended upon the number of good camels 
at our disposal. They lived on grazing as we 
marched (we never gave them grain or fodder) ; and 
after their six weeks on the road they would be worn 
thin, and have to be sent to pasture for some months® 
rest, while we called out another tribe in replacement, 
or found fresh riding-beasts.” 

- Tradition says that the horse originated in Arabia. 

The most beautiful and symmetrical horses are found 
there. They do not, however, have the greatest 
powers of endurance; neither are they the fleetest. 


180 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


The Arabs are very fond and proud of their horses, _ 
They are really domestic animals, and it is by no 
means uncommon for them to occupy the same tent 
as their master. The pedigrees of some of them can 
be traced back to the fifth century, and registered 
mares are seldom sold, although stallions are some- 
times given away to distinguished foreigners. It is 
maintained that a female, whether horse or camel, 
has much more highly developed powers of endurance. 
The Arabs oil the hoofs of their horses to keep them 
from slipping on the hot sand, and feed them on 
boiled goat’s-meat to give them staying powers. 
They are seldom given all the water they desire to 
drink. Even as colts they are continually stinted 
of water so that they may become inured to thirst and 
suffer as little as possible when crossing the dry parts 
of the Arabian Desert. Many of the water-holes of 
the desert are five days’ travel apart. A horse, of 
course, cannot go so long without water; a camel 
can, however, and so an Arabian horse will travel 
by the side of a camel and drink the camel’s milk, 
and in that manner make the distance from one 
water-hole to another. 

The foregoing is but a small fraction of the horse 
and camel lore familiar to a Bedouin expert. After 
years of careful study in the Arabian and Syrian 
deserts, Lawrence confessed to me that often he could 
not size up his dromedary correctly. 





CHAPTER XVI 


ABDULLAH THE POCK-MARKED, AND THE STORY 
OF FERRAJ AND DAOUD 


BDULLAH, the pock-marked, undersized, 


fiery little Bedouin who commanded Law- 
rence’s personal body-guard, although in ap- 
pearance a dried-up stick of a man, is one of the most 
daring and chivalrous sons of Ishmael that ever rode 
a dromedary. He would take keen delight in tack- 
ling ten men by himself. Apart from his fearless- 
ness, he was a valuable lieutenant, because he knew 
how to deal with unruly members of the body-guard. 
Lawrence would urge his followers on with the prom: 
ise of extravagant rewards—gold, jewels, and beauti- 
ful clothes—if they succeeded. Abdullah would 
promise them a sound beating if they failed, and the 
certainty that he would fulfil his threat carried at 
least as much weight with the body-guard as did 
Lawrence’s milder method. As for Abdullah him- 
self, his most frequent boast was that he had served 
under all the princes of the desert and had been im- 
prisoned by every one of them. 
The English shereef’s personal body-guard, con- 
sisting of eighty carefully picked men, was the corps 


délite of the desert. All its men were famous 
181 


182 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


fighters who possessed powers of endurance which 
would enable them to ride hard for a day and a night 
on end, if necessary. They were required to be 
ready for a raid on the Turks ‘at any moment, and 
always to keep up with their leader on the trek. No 
man was accepted who could not, with one hand free, 
leap into the camel-saddle at the trot while carrying 
a rifle in the other. Taking it all round, the body- 
guard was an extraordinary collection of mettlesome, 
gay-spirited, good-natured scalawags. 

Its members were devoted to their Anglo-Bedouin 
shereef; but to guard against the possibility of a con- 
spiracy among them, never more than two men were 
selected from each tribe, so that intertribal jealousy 
might prevent any group from plotting against their 
leader. Nearly every man in the Hedjaz army 
wanted to belong to the body-guard, because Law- 
rence took it on all of his raiding, bridge-blowing, 
and train-wrecking expeditions, “stunts” which pro- 
vided much loot and many thrills—gifts dear to the 
heart of the Bedouin. Then, too, the pay was greater 
than that given to any of the other volunteers in the 
Arabian army. Furthermore, they received a liberal 
allowance for costly raiment, for they spent all their 
money on clothes, and when gathered in a body they 
produced an effect similar to that of an Oriental 
flower-garden. 

A familiar saying among them was that they might 
as well spend their gold on clothes and a good time, 
since Allah might take them to paradise at any mo- 





ABDULLAH THE POCK-MARKED 183 


ment. Among Colonel Lawrence’s personal retinue 
the percentage of casualties was far greater than 
among other regulars and irregulars of Feisal’s army, 
for they were continually being sent across the desert 
on dangerous missions. Frequently they were des- 
patched through the Turkish lines to act as spies, a 
service for which the body-guard was especially suit- 
able, since it contained at least one man from each 
district between Mecca and Aleppo. Lawrence 
always arrogated to himself more than his full share 
of these hazardous missions. 

To accompany Lawrence and his body-guard on 
an expedition was a fantastic experience. First rode 
the young shereef, incongruously picturesque with 
his Anglo-Saxon face, gorgeous head-dress, and beau- 
tiful robes. Likely enough, if the party were moving 
at walking pace, he would be reading and smiling to 
himself over the brilliant satire of Aristophanes in 
the original. Then in a long, irregular column his 
Bedouin “sons” followed in their rainbow-colored 
garments, swaying to the rhythm of the camel gait. 
And whether they were passing over the sands east 
of Akaba, or the stony hill country of Edom and 
Moab, they always sang and Jested. 

At either end of the cavalcade was a warrior-poet. 
One of them would begin to chant a verse, and each 
man, all along the column, would take his turn to 
cap the poet’s words with lines of the same meter. 
There were war-songs and songs that caused the 
camels to lower their heads and move at a faster 


184 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


pace. Often in the verses the men commented on 
each other’s love-affairs or on the Emir Feisal or 
Sidi (Lord) Lawrence. 

“T wish he would pay us another pound a month.” 
This, decorated with rhetorical flourishes in Arabic, 
was the theme of the body-guard’s song one day. 

Another time it was: “I wonder if Allah has seen 
the head-cloth which has the good fortune to cover 
our Lord Lawrence’s head? It is not a good head- 
cloth. The Lord Lawrence should give it me.” As 
a matter of fact, the head-cloths that Shereef Law- 
rence wore were more resplendent than any they had 
ever seen. His playful “sons” coveted them. 

The harmonic scale of Arabian music is different 
from ours, so that to Western ears unused to it Ara- 
bian singing sounds like a medley of discords. Yet 
the Bedouin delighted in Western music churned out 
by a phonograph that Lawrence brought from Cairo. 
Its success encouraged a Scotch sergeant in Akaba 
to provide some instruments and organize a band. 
He helped the Arab bandsmen to create an Arabian 
national anthem and taught them to play “Annie 
Laurie” and “Auld Lang Syne” after a fashion. 
The, Scotch airs we could stand for a time, even 
though every instrument was out of tune and every 
man chose his own key; but whenever the Arabs prac- 
tised their own national anthem around the camp we 
preferred swimming and left at once for a deserted 
island down the gulf for a dip in the surf just below 
the ruin of a Crusader castle, where Godfrey de 





ABDULLAH THE POCK-MARKED 185 


Bouillon and his knights had bathed a thousand years 
before us. 

The Bedouin body-guard’s sense of humor some- 
times took the form of practical jokes. If one of 
their number fell asleep in his saddle, a companion 
would charge his camel straight at the slumberer and 
knock him off. Whenever their Lord left them for a 
visit to Cairo or to Allenby’s headquarters, most of 
his body-guard managed to get themselves imprisoned 
by the Emir Feisal as a result of their wild humor 
and general unruliness. Nobody but Lawrence 
could handle his devils, as they were called. 

Once, having just returned to Akaba from Egypt, 
he wanted to set out on a secret mission without delay. 
As usual, he found the majority of his personal fol- 
lowers in the lockup. Among the prisoners were two 
specially daring men named Ferraj and Daoud. 
Lawrence immediately sent for Sheik Yussef, the 
civil governor of Akaba, and asked what had hap- 
pened. Yussef laughed and cursed, then laughed 
again. 

“T had a beautiful white camel,” he said, “and one 
night she strayed away. Next morning I heard a 
great commotion in the street, and when I went out 
I found every one in the bazaar laughing uproariously 
at an animal with blue legs and a red head. Not 
without difficulty I recognized it as my camel. Fer- 
raj and Daoud were found at the waterfront wash- 
ing red henna and blue indigo dye off their arms, yet 
they denied all knowledge of my beautiful white 


186 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


camel. Allah will pardon me for doubting them.” 

Ferraj and Daoud were well known as inseparable 
in a land where lonely desert and the need for 
mutual protection called for close friendship. David 
and Jonathan were not more intimate than Ferraj 
and Daoud, until, as an eastern story-teller might say, 
there came to them the Destroyer of Delights and the 
Garnerer of Graveyards. Daoud died of fever in 
Akaba, whereupn Ferra} became intensely miserable 
and soon afterward committed suicide by galloping 
his camel headlong into the Turks. 

Occasionally members of Lawrence’s body-guard 
accompanied him to Cairo. Those thus honored 
would don their most vivid robes, rouge their lips, 
darken the hollows under their eyes with kohl, and 
saturate themselves with bottles of scent. ‘Then, 
bristling with weapons, they swaggered contemp- 
tuously past the town Arabs of Cairo, ogling the 
veiled ladies, buying richly brocaded garments, and 
causing much excitement, in which they reveled. 

Abdullah, lieutenant of the body-guard, once 
traveled with his leader to General Allenby’s head- 
quarters at Ramleh. While Lawrence was in con- 
sultation with the commander-in-chief, the Arab 
lieutenant roamed off alone. Six hours passed, and 
he did not return. Then Lawrence was informed by 
telephone that the assistant provost-marshal had ar- 
rested the fiery little Arab because he looked like a 
hired assassin who might be prowling around with the 
intention of shooting General Allenby. ‘ Abdullah, 





ao) 


ABDULLAH THE POCK-MARKED 187 


said the assistant provost-marshal, had explained 
through an interpreter that he was one of Sidi Law- 
rence’s “sons” and demanded a ceremonious apology 
for having been arrested. Meantime, he was eating 
up all the oranges in the quarters of the head of the 
military police. 

Punishment for the misdeeds of the various mem- 
bers of the body-guard was difficult, for a nomad 
Arab can scarcely be imprisoned om his camel, and he 
cares naught for words of reproof. A conscientious 
beating from Abdullah was perhaps the most effec- 
tive solution. A common form of punishment 
among the Bedouins is to throw at a man’s head a 
short dagger, so that it shall chop through the hair 
and cause a superficial but very painful scalp wound. 
Bedouins who are conscious of transgression some- 
times wound themselves in this manner, and then, 
with blood streaming over their faces, crave pardon 
of the person they have wronged. 


CHAPTER XVII 


AN EYE FOR AN EYE AND A 
TOOTH FOR A TOOTH 


an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, still 

holds good; complicated feuds drag on for cen- 
turies. A murderer can rarely escape the death pen- 
alty; it is almost impossible for him to avoid being 
found by the murdered man’s relatives somewhere in 
the desert sooner or later. His only chance is to re- 
linquish tent-dwelling and become a townsman; 
and since the Bedouin regards people who live in 
villages and cities as greatly inferior to him, he can 
seldom bring himself to such an indignity. 

A peculiar feature of Arabian unwritten law 
is that for purposes of retribution no distinction 
is drawn between accidental and intentional man- 
slaughter. If one Bedouin kills another, whether 
by chance or design, it is customary for him to flee 
and send regrets and explanations back by courier. 
Lawrence’s body-guard was involved in an affair of 
this sort. During a raid an Arab climbed through 
the window of a railway station and attempted to. 


open the door from. the inside. Meanwhile, some 
188 


[: Arabia the Old Testament law of an eye for 





AN EYE FOR AN EYE 189 


of his companions were trying to batter it open 
from without. One of them fired his rifle through 
a panel, and when the door finally was forced, the 
man who had entered through the window was 
lying dead. ‘The Bedouin who had fired the shot 
immediately dashed through the crowd, jumped on 
his horse, and galloped off. Now, it is the custom 
that the slayer may avoid the penalty of death 
by paying damages if the lost man’s relatives are 
willing to accept money in lieu of life. In this case 
the guards collected among themselves a sum of £100, 
which they sent to the relatives, and all was well. 
The rate of exchange on an ordinary life varies 
from £100 to £500. This particular fellow was 
rather a bad lot, and so his companions of the body- 
guard thought £100 was ample. Shereefs (members 
of the Prophet’s family) have a far higher blood 
value than other Arabs. Having killed one of them, 
a slayer must forfeit not less than £1000, unless he 
has arranged a bargain price with his victim’s family 
before committing the deed. 

Lawrence never met a case of treachery against 
himself among the tribes with whom he established 
friendly relations, and even among unfriendly tribes 
he encountered only one serious violation of the laws 
of hospitality. Alone he had passed through the 
Turkish lines for a tour of inspection among the ene- 
my’s camps. He called on a chieftain of the Beni- 
Sakr, a tribe which had been cooperating with 
the Turks and Germans. The sheik broke the un- 


199 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


written law of the desert and attempted to double- 
cross his guest. He sent a courier to some Turkish 
‘forces that were ten miles distant and, in the mean- 
time, attempted to persuade Lawrence to remain in 
his tent. His intention was to betray his valuable 
visitor and claim the £50,000 reward offered for the 
capture of the “uncrowned king of Arabia.” But 
Lawrence’s uncanny insight into the minds of 
Orientals caused him to surmise that there was 
villainy afoot, and he hurriedly left the Beni-Sakr 
camp. The fate that befell the sheik of the Beni- 
Sakr is instructive. Although he was one of the 
leaders of a tribe considered hostile to the Arabs co- 
operating with Lawrence, his own people gave him 
a cup of poisoned coffee because he had been 
treacherous to a guest. The people of the Beni- 
Sakr felt themselves disgraced by the act of their 
sheik. | 

The strict observance of the rules of desert 
hospitality is almost a religion. If in his own 
district an Arab has a man at his mercy and is about 
to kill him, the victim can usually save himself by 
saying “dakhilak,’ an Arab word implying, “I 
have taken refuge with you, ”’ or, “I am in your tent 
and at your coffee-hearth as your guest.” Among 
the Bedouins the protection is a sacred obligation. 
The meaning of this magic word “dakhilak” is one of 
the points of difference between the nomads of Arabia 
and the town Arabs of Syria. The Syrian uses it 





.?> 
Rs . 
i. 


AN EYE FOR AN EYE 191 


as a variation of “please,” which to a Bedouin is a 
ghastly breach of etiquette. 

In the gigantic task that he set himself, Lawrence 
had to win the adherence not only of the wandering 
tribesmen but of the less reliable Arabs of the towns 
and villages. He accomplished this by taking into 
account the many differences between the two types, 
and using correspondingly different methods. ‘The 
Bedouin is-of a pure breed and to-day lives in much 
the same manner as he did three thousand years ago 
when Abraham and Lot were wandering patriarchs. 
The townsman, a mixture of all races in the East, 
has many a bar sinister in his racial ancestry. The 
nomad is a sportsman, a lover of personal liberty, and 
a natural poet. The villager is often indolent, dirty, 
untrustworthy, and entirely mercenary. There are 
even differences in the every-day observances of 
hfe; in the form of salutation, for instance. ‘The 
townsman shows his respect for shereefs and other 
notables by kissing the hand, but the Bedouin 
considers such action undignified and only per- 
forms it when he wishes to convey the deepest 
reverence. 

Although Lawrence received support from many 
town Arabs, it was primarily the Bedouin who, under 
the guidance of Lawrence and Feisal, carried the 
Arabian revolution from small, localized beginnings 
to glorious success. ‘The Bedouin passion for raiding 
and looting was a valuable asset in the guerrilla 


192 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


campaign against the Turks. But the true Bedouin 
is nearly always content with booty and abhors the 
sight of blood. He will rob but will not otherwise 
abuse a stranger. 

The pure Arabs of the desert belong to a race that 
has one of the oldest forms of civilization. ‘They 
had a philosophy and literature when the inhabit- 
ants of the British Isles were undeveloped savages. 
They are one of the few peoples of the world whom 
the Romans failed to conquer. Their primitiveness 
is due to the necessity of leading a nomadic life, as 
they are obliged to follow their herds from place to 
place in search of grass and water. They are 
wanderers on the face of the earth; creatures who 
trek behind their camels across the sand-dunes, who 
sleep under starry skies, and who live as their fore- 
fathers lived when the human race was young. 

Both the regulars and the irregulars in the Arabian 
army were paid wages just the same as other Allied 
troops in other parts of the world. They received 
their pay in gold coin, all of which was supplied by 
the British Government. Lawrence usually had a 
bag or two of sovereigns in his tent, and whenever 
a sheik came in and asked for money, Lawrence 
would tell him to help himself. He allowed them 
to keep all that they could take out of the bag in one 
handful. A  swarthy two-fisted Howeitat giant 
dropped in for a cup of coffee and a cigarette one 
morning. In the richly ornamented language of 
the people of the black tents he reminded Lawrence 


AN EYE FOR AN EYE 193 


of the valuable assistance that he had been rendering 
King Hussein. Lawrence took the thinly veiled 
hint, and, pointing to his gold bag in one corner, he 
asked his guest to help himself. The sheik broke all 
records by picking up one hundred and forty-three 
sovereigns in one hand! 

The nomad tribes are amazed at the sordid lack of 
hospitality in the towns. ‘They despise their settled 
kinsmen for their selfishness. In older times, just as 
to-day, the Arabs prided themselves on four things: 
their poetry, their eloquence, their horsemanship, and 
their: hospitality. Among Arab legends are many 
which glorify and keep alive the tradition of hospital- 
ity. One concerns three men who were disputing in 
the sacred mosque of the Kaaba as to who was the 
most liberal person in Mecca. One extolled the vir- 
tues of a certain Abdullah, the son of the nephew of 
Jaafar, the uncle of Mohammed. Another praised 
the generosity of Kais Ibn Said. The third pro- 
claimed Arabah, the aged sheik, to be the most liberal. 
At last a bystander, to end the discussion and avoid 
bloodshed, suggested that each should go and ask for 
assistance from the one whose liberality he had ex- 
tolled and return to the mosque, where the evidence 
would be weighed and judgment given. ‘This agreed 
upon, they set forth. Abdullah’s friend going to him, 
found him mounting his dromedary for lands beyond 
the horizon, and thus accosted him: “O son of the 
nephew of the uncle of the apostle of Allah and 
Father of Generosity, I am traveling and in dire 


194 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


necessity.” Upon which Abdullah bade him take his 
camel with all that was upon her. So he took the 
camel and found on her some vests of silk and five 
thousand pieces of gold. 

The second went to Kais Ibn Said. The latter’s 
servant told him that his master was asleep and de- 
sired to know his mission. 'The friend answered that 
being in want he came to ask Kais’s assistance. The 
servant protested that he himself preferred to supply 
the necessity rather than wake his master; so saying, 
he gave him a purse of ten thousand pieces of gold, 
all the money in his master’s house, and likewise di- 
rected him to go to the caravansary with a certain 
token and take therefrom a camel and a slave. When 
Kais awoke, his servant informed him of what had 
occurred. Kais was so much pleased that he gave 
the servant his freedom, at the same time upbraiding 
him for not arousing him. “By my life!’ he said, 
“would that thou hadst called me that I could have 
given him more.” 

The third man went to Arabah and met the old 
shiek coming out of his house on his way to noonday 
prayers at the Kaaba. His eyesight having failed 
him, he was supported by two slaves. When the 
friend made known his plight, Arabah let go the 
slaves and, clapping his hands together in the name 
of Allah, loudly lamented his misfortune in having no 
money, but he offered to give him his two slaves. 
The man refused his offer, whereupon Arabah pro- 
tested that since he would not accept them he must 


cake = 








AN EYE FOR AN EYE 195 


give them their liberty. Saying this, he left the 
slaves and groped his way along the wall. On the 
return of the adventurers a unanimous judgment was 
rendered in favor of Arabah as the most generous of 
the three. “May Allah reward him!” cried they with 
fervor. 

This legend may well be founded on fact, for one 
sees many examples of this spirit of liberality, a lib- 
erality which increases one’s admiration for these 
children of Allah. Lawrence, recognizing gen- 
erosity to be a cardinal virtue with the Arabs, made it 
a point to excel them in this as well as in bravery, 
physical endurance, and nimbleness of wit, which 
they somuch admire. After the first successes, which 
enabled him to gain the confidence of his own govern- 
ment, he brought caravans laden with presents rich 
and rare, and bewildered them with a prodigality sur- 
passing even the legends in the classic poems recited 
round their camp-fires and extolling the generosity of 
the califs of old. 

The Bedouins were all particularly fond of wrist- 
watches, revolvers, and _ field-glasses, so _ that 
Lawrence used to take two or three camels laden with 
trinkets of that sort to give away. He also gave his 
men from fifty to one hundred pounds of ammunition 
each day, and they always shot it off into the air 
regardless of whether they were fighting or not! In 
most armies if a man fires off a single round of am- 
munition without the permission of his commanding 
officer, he is court-martialed. ‘The Arabs shot at 


196 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


every sparrow they saw, and one day, when a false 
rumor came in to us at Akaba that Maan had been 
captured by Feisal’s chief of staff, General Nuri Bey, 
thousands of rounds were fired wildly into the sky. 
If the Bedouins who came into the supply-bases 
along the Red Sea coast happened to see a British 
officer strolling along with nothing but a riding-crop 
or a stick, they would shake their heads, stroke their 
beards, and say: “Mad Anglesi! Mad Anglesi!” 
But if the officer were wandering about with a rifle 
blazing away at every rock or bird in sight, they 
would remark in the Arabian equivalent: “I say, 
these blighters are not such silly asses after all. 
Really, they are quite sane, don’t you know.” 

Like the sepoys of India in the days of Clive, the 
Bedouins refused to clean their rifles with grease 
made from pork, simply because the Mohammedan 
religion teaches them that pork is unclean. So Law- 
rence either had to clean all the rifles in the Arabian 
army himself or provide rifles that did not have to 
be cleaned. He solved this problem by equipping 
them with German nickel-steel rifles which Allenby 
had captured on the Palestine front, rifles that could 
survive a year’s service without being cleaned. 

The freedom of the desert has been his for thou- 
sands of years; so naturally the Bedouin is independ- 
ent by nature. “Discipline” and “obedience” are un- 
known words to him. Probably none of Lawrence’s 
men would have made a high record in the senior 





AN EYE FOR AN EYE 197 


examinations at Sandhurst or West Point, but they 
did know how to fight the Turks—and how to whip 
them. ‘They regarded themselves as of equal rank 
with any general! 

These, then, were the men Lawrence had to mold 
from an inchoate, intertribal conglomeration into a 
large army capable of defeating highly trained and 
well-officered forces. All the organization had to be 
improvised on original lines. There was no commis- 
sariat department. When the Bedouin irregulars 
started off on an expedition, each man carried a small 
bag of flour and some coffee. Every meal was the 
same. ‘I'he entire army lived and fought on un- 
leavened bread baked in ashes. The Arabs could 
eat a pound or two at a time, but Lawrence usually 
carried a chunk in the folds of his gown and nibbled 
at it as he rode at the head of a column. 

The Bedouin looked upon tinned food as a dubious 
institution. One day, when Major Maynard was ac- 
companying us on a journey over the desert north- 
east of Akaba, he handed a tin of bully beef to each 
of the men with us. They took the meat reluctantly 
and seemed to regard it as unholy. It was then we 
discovered how suspicious the Arab was of things in 
tins—but from religious, not hygienic motives. It is 
customary for an Arab, when he cuts the throat of 
a sheep or of any other animal, to say, as he inserts 
the knife, “In the name of Allah the Merciful and 
the Compassionate!’ When they opened the tins 


198 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


they repeated these same words, fearful lest the Chi- 
cago packers had not performed the ceremony ac- 
cording to the law of the Prophet. 

Apart from a few such formal observances, the 
average Bedouin is by no means a religious fanatic. 
He refuses to take notice of the three cardinal prin- 
ciples of Mohammedanism. He never fasts for, says 
he, “We never have enough to eat as it is!” He 
rarely bathes, using the excuse, ‘““We have not even 
enough water to drink.” He seldom prays, for he 
maintains, “Our prayers are never answered, so why 
bother ?”’ 

But with all his looting and his lack of religion, 
the Bedouin is a man of honor and a man of humor. 





CHAPTER XVIII 
A ROSE-RED CITY HALF AS OLD AS TIME 
NE of the most colorful and romantic epi- 
sodes of the war in the Land of the Arabian 
Nights was a battle fought in an ancient 


deserted city that had been asleep for a thousand 
years, only to wake to the booming of big guns and 


the spirited clash of Turks and Arabs. Here, 


among the immemorial and perfect ruins of a lost 
civilization, Lawrence the archeologist and Lawrence 
the military genius merged in one. ‘To the few trav- 
elers who have ventured into that hidden corner of 
the Arabian desert it is known as a “rose-red city, 
half as old as time,” carved out of the enchanted 
mountains of Edom. It lies deep in the wilderness 
of the desert, not far from Mount Hor, where the 
Israelites are believed to have buried their great 
leader, Aaron. 

The battle took place on October 21, 1917, shortly 
after the fall of Akaba. It was important from a 
military standpoint because it definitely decided that 
the uprising against the Turks in Holy Arabia was to 
develop into an invasion of Syria, an affair of world- 
wide importance destined to revolutionize the history 


of the Near East. In this battle Lawrence and his 
199 


200 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Bedouins fought the Turks on the same mountain- 
tops from which Amaziah, king of Israel, hurled ten 
thousand of the inhabitants to the cafions below. 
Lawrence successfully defended the city against the 
Turks in much the same way that the Nabatzans de- 
fended it against the armies of Alexander the Great 
three hundred years before Christ. He trapped the 
Turks in the same narrow gorge that resounded to 
the tramp of Trajan’s conquering legions two thou- 
sand years ago. 

After hearing Lawrence’s enthusiastic description 
of the palaces carved out of the living rock, where 
he had camped with his Bedouins, I asked Emir 
Feisal if he would permit me to do a bit of exploring 
among the mountains of Edom. He not only 
granted the request but gave us a picked band of 
his wildest brigands as a body-guard to protect us 
from robbers and enemy patrols. From Akaba we 
trekked thirty-eight miles through the Wadi Ithm to 
one of Feisal’s outposts, at Gueirra. The Wadi 
Ithm is a narrow gorge hemmed in by jagged granite 
mountains crisscrossed with black lava veins from 
twenty to two hundred feet wide caused by volcanic 
eruption ages ago. This weird wadi pours out on 
to a mud plain which reminded us of the Bad Lands | 
of Dakota and the high plateaus of Central Baluchi- 
stan. Here we occupied a deserted bell-tent for 
several days before continuing our trek across arid 
mountain ranges and sandy desert stretches. Up 
and up we went over a precipitous rocky zigzag trail, 





A ROSE-RED CITY 201 


where our camels, time after time, stumbled to their 
knees. Reaching the summit of the Nagb, the camel- 
track led across a grassy plateau to the battle-field 
around the wells of Abu el Lissan. General Nuri 
Pasha, one of the commanders of Feisal’s army, 
turned out his troops to welcome us. We stopped 
a few minutes for coffee, and as I left the general’s 
tent he picked up the princely Persian lamb rug on 
which we had been sitting and threw it over my camel- 
saddle, insisting, in spite of all my protests, that I 
should take it along and use it as a cushion. He 
also lent me a hippopotamus-hide cane, presented to 
him by the king of Abyssinia, with which to guide 
my dromedary. A few miles beyond Abu el Lissan 
a courier from Feisal caught up with us and handed 
me a letter of introduction from the emir to his com- 
mander at Busta. The courier was a swarthy rascal, 
who looked like Captain Kidd, with his flashing black 
eyes and fierce upturned mustachios. His red head- 
cloth was embroidered with huge yellow flowers, and 
his robes flashed as many colors as Joseph’s coat. At 
his belt were a pearl-handled revolver and two 
wicked-looking daggers. To my amazement he 
spoke typical New York Bowery English and 
dropped such remarks as, “Say, cull, will youse slip 
me de can-opener?” He informed me that he had 
lived fourteen years in America as a machine-oper- 
ator in a cigarette factory. 

He was born in the mountains of Lebanon, and his 
real name was Hassan Khalil, but in New York he 


202 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


was plain Charley Kelly. At the outbreak of the 
World War, he was working for Thomas Cook & 
Son in Constantinople and was immediately con- 
scripted into the Turkish army. At the second bat- 
tle of Gaza he deserted and joined the Australian 
forces as an interpreter. After serving with the 
British in Egypt, he was finally transferred to the 
Hedjaz army. As soon as we became better ac- 
quainted, Charley told me he was not a Moham- 
medan, but an “R.C.,” which he explained in a whis- 
per stood for Roman Catholic. But he begged me 
not to reveal his secret to any of the other members 
of the caravan, for he feared that he would be killed 
instantly by some of our over-zealous Moslem com- 
panions, should they discover his apostacy. Charley 
Kelly entertained us around the camp-fire with detec- 
tive yarns. He had several Arabic translations of 
“Nick Carter” in his saddle-bags and said the Egyp- 
tians believe Nick Carter to be the actual head of 
the American Secret Service. According to Charley, 
“Nick Carter” is a best seller in Egypt, where his 
exploits are regarded as authentic history. If an 
Egyptian cannot read himself, he hires a public 
reader to entertain him with one of these detective 
tales. Another member of our column was a silent 
Egyptian with an immobile face that might have 
been chiseled out of stone. We dubbed him Rameses 
because he looked so much lke the statues of that 
mighty potentate along the Nile. The rest of our 
picturesque body-guard was made up of Lawrence’s 








THE NARROW DEFILE THAT LEADS TO THE “‘Lost cITY”’ 





A PEASANT WOMAN OF SYRIA TYPES OF CITY HEAD-DRESS FOR 
WOMEN 








A ROSE-RED CITY 203 


Bedouins. All these Beau Brummels used kohl- 
sticks under their eyebrows and rouge on their lips 
and cheeks. The prophet Mohammed is said to 
have remarked on one occasion that there were two 
things no true believer should ever lend to his brother 
—his kohl-stick and his wife. 

Every morning Charley had to help Chase, who 
is a little man, mount his camel. Practically every 
camel Chase rode died in its tracks before the end 
of the journey. He was singled out as the special 
object of attraction by all the insects of the desert. 
Several mornings when we crawled out of our 
sleeping-bags we found scorpions and centipedes 
between Chase’s blankets. One morning Chase 
handed a treasured can of bacon to one of the mem- 
bers of our body-guard with instructions to cook him 
a breakfast that would remind him of home. But 
he ended by frying his own bacon. As soon as the 
can was opened the Bedouin cook dropped it in hor- 
ror and backed off, aghast that his Moslem nostrils 
had been profaned with the aroma of unclean meat. 
Like all Mohammedans, Arabs will not use pork in 
any form. They cook their food in butter made 
from goat’s milk. 

That day we passed a flock of white sheep, all of 
them fat as butter, with thick curly wool and cute 
little corkscrew horns. A Bedouin shepherd sat 
near-by on a lump of basalt strumming an ancient 
Arab love-song on his lute. Some of these uplands 

of the Hedjaz are carpeted with barely enough grass 


204 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


for sheep pasture, and a few of the more settled 
tribes tend flocks rather than breeding camels or 
horses. One schemer from Bagdad, hearing of the 
uprising in the Hedjaz, was far-sighted enough to 
realize that the Allies were bound to take an interest 
in the affair sooner or later and that British gold 
pieces would supplant the Turkish sovereigns which 
long had been the medium of exchange along the 
desert fringe. So, from lead gilded over, he made 
thousands of counterfeit British sovereigns, and as 
soon as the first gold began coming into the Hedjaz 
from Egypt, but before the Bedouins were familiar 
enough with it to detect the spurious from the genu- 
ine, he trekked across the country buying all the 
sheep he could find. Instead of the normal price of 
one pound for each animal, he offered two of his 
counterfeit pieces. Then before the Bedouins had 
time to get into Jeddah, Yenbo, and Wedj to spend 
their gold in the bazaars, the Bagdadi drove.his sheep 
north to Palestine, and sold them at two pounds a 
head to the British army. When the hoax was dis- 
covered he had vanished into the blue. 

Distances in Arabia are not gaged by miles but 
by water-holes. The night after our unfortunate 
bacon incident, just as we had finished putting up 
our pup-tent at “third water,’ otherwise known as 
Busta, twenty Arab regulars came along mounted on 
Peruvian mules. 'The mules were camel-shy, and as 
soon as they saw our caravan they bolted at top 
speed in all directions, some of them bucking off 





A ROSE-RED CITY 205 


their riders and disappearing into the mountains of 
Edom. ‘These soldiers, who hailed from Mecca, sat 
up all night shouting and singing around our camp- 
fire and firing their rifles into the dark. ‘The Turk- 
ish lines were only a few miles away, and I had a 
presentiment that a Turkish patrol would slip up 
during the confusion and put a finish to the hilarity 
by scuppering the lot of us. Nothing happened, 
however, and after trekking eighty miles across 
country without a single skirmish with the Turks to 
make the expedition more lively, we came out on 
the top of a high plateau. 

Spreading off to the northwest before us were 
magnificent ridges of white and red _ sandstone. 
About twenty miles to the north lay the valley of 
the Dead Sea, and beyond, disappearing in purple 
and gray haze, the Central Arabian Desert. The 
peaks ahead were the sacred mountains of Edom. 
Our problem was to penetrate that massive range of 
sandstone before us. We descended from the high 
plateau into a valley twelve miles wide that narrowed 
to twelve feet, a mere defile through the mountain 
wall. ‘Through this gorge, or sik, as it is called by 
the Arabs, our camels and horses scrambled over 
boulders and pushed their way through thousands of 
oleander-bushes, while the Arabs popped away with 
their pistols at the lizards creeping across the stones. 
As we wandered through this rent in the rock we 
marveled at its beautiful walls towering hundreds 
of feet above us, at times almost shutting out the sky. 


206 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


And on each side, aloft and wild, 
Huge cliffs and toppling crags were piled. 


Hassan Morgani, one of our Bedouins, who wore a 
purple jacket trimmed in green and a pair of cavalry 
boots that he had taken from a dead Turkish officer, 
told us that the gorge was the Wadi Musa, the 
Valley of Moses. Charley Kelly confirmed this with 
the assertion that it was here that Moses brought 
the water gushing from the rock. To-day every 
Arab family in this region has its little Moses. 
Through the narrow gorge a brook plunged in and 
out among the great boulders, the oleanders, and the 
wild fig-trees. High above, the sun warmed the tops 
of slender cathedral rocks to a wonderful rose red. 

After pushing our way through the gorge for more 
than an hour, we suddenly rounded the last bend and 
stood breathless and speechless. There, in front of 
us, many miles from any sign of civilized habitation, 
deep in the heart of the Arabian Desert, was one 
of the most bewildering sights ever revealed to the 
eye of man—a temple, a delicate and limpid rose, 
carved like a cameo from a solid mountain wall. It 
was even more beautiful than the Temple of Theseus 
at Athens or the Forum at Rome. After trekking 
nearly a hundred miles across the desert, to come 
suddenly face to face with such a marvelous struc- 
ture fairly took our breath away. It was the first 
indication we had that we had at last reached the 
mysterious city of Petra, a city deserted and lost te 





A ROSE-RED CITY 207 


history for fourteen hundred years and only redis- 
covered during the last century by the famous Swiss 
explorer, Burckhardt. 

The secret of the enchantment of this first temple 
we saw lies partly in its position at one of the most 
unusual gateways in the world. The columns, pedi- 
ments, and friezes have been richly carved, but it is 
difficult to distinguish many of the designs, which 
have been disfigured by time and Mohammedan 
iconoclasts. At one side are two rows of niches, evi- 
dently the traces of ladders used by the sculptors who 
carved their way down. ‘These artist-artisans used a 
tooth tool that they might get the maximum effect 
out of the colored strata, which seem to form a per- 
fect quilt of ribbons and swirl like watered silk in 
the morning sunlight. Although the temple is won- 
derfully preserved, it shows the effects of the sand- 
blasts of the centuries. The auditorium within is 
almost a perfect cube, forty feet each way. ‘The 
architecture is of a corrupt Roman-Grecian style. 
The temple was carved from the cliff almost two 
thousand years ago during the reign of the Roman 
Emperor Hadrian, who visited Petra in a.p. 1381. 
The desert Arabs who were with me said it was 
called El Khazneh, or the Treasury, because of the 
great urn that surmounts the edifice, which the Bed- 
ouins believe is filled with gold and precious jewels of 
the Pharaohs. Many attempts have been made to 
crack the urn, and it has been chipped by thousands 
of bullets. My body-guard also fired away at it, but 


208 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


fortunately it was nearly a hundred feet above their 
heads. Colonel Lawrence is of the opinion that the 
building was a. temple dedicated to Isis, a goddess 
popular during the reign of Hadrian. One traveler 
had carved his name in letters a foot high on one 
of the pillars of the temple, but Lawrence ordered 
his men to polish it out. 

The city lay farther down on the plain of an oval 
valley, a mile and a half long and half a mile wide. 
How populous it was there is no way of telling, but 
several hundred thousand people must once have 
lived there. Only the more insignificant buildings 
have perished, and even of these some striking ruins 
remain. ‘The upper part of the valley is the site of 
ancient fortresses, palaces, tombs, and amusement 
resorts—all carved out of the solid rock. ‘The lower 
part was apparently a water circus where the people 
indulged in aquatic sports and tournaments. Petra 
is a huge excavation made by the forces of nature. 
From the nine-thousand-foot plateau from which we 
first saw the mountains of Edom, we had dropped 
down to an altitude of one thousand feet when we 
entered the ruined city. 

All the travelers who have visited Petra have 
marveled at the wonderful tints of its sandstone cliffs. 
It is carved from rock the colors of which beggar 
description at certain hours of the day. In the 
morning sunlight they are like great rainbows of 
stone flashing out white, vermilion, saffron, orange, 
pink, and crimson. Time and the forces of nature 





A ROSE-RED CITY 209 


have played the magician, painting the different 
strata in rare tints and hues. In places the layers 
of rock dip and swerve like waves. At sunset they 
glow with strange radiance before sinking into the 
sombre darkness of the desert night. "We wondered 
at times whether we were really awake or whether 
we had not been transported to fairy-land on a 
magically colored Persian carpet. 

Stairs carved from the rock, some more than a 
mile in length, run to the top of nearly all the moun- 
tains around Petra. We climbed one great stair- 
case ascending to a height of one thousand feet above 
the city to the temple which the Arabs call El Deir, 
or the Convent, a most impressive gray facade, one 
hundred and fifty feet high, surmounted by a gigan- 
tic urn, and decorated with heads of Medusa. Most 
of the steps cut into the mountains lead to sacrificial 
altars, where the people used to worship on the high 
places thousands of years ago. An even greater 
staircase winds up to the Mount of Sacrifice, an iso- 
lated peak that dominates the whole basin. On the 
summit are two obelisks and two altars. One altar 
is hollowed out for making fires, and the other is 
round and provided with a blood-pool for the slaugh- 
ter of the victim offered to Dhu-shara and Allat, the 
chief god and goddess of ancient Petra. One of my 
Bedouin companions insisted upon taking off his 
raiment and bathing in the rain-water which had col- 
lected in the pool. The average Bedouin needs a 
little encouragement along these lines, and so we did 


210 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


not reprimand him for his sacrilegious act. Law- 
rence told me that it was supposed to be the most 
complete and perfect example in existence of an 
ancient Semitic high place. Near the altars are 
the two great monoliths, each about twenty-four 
feet high, which the people of Petra carved out 
of the solid rock and used in their phallic wor- 
ship, one of the oldest forms of worship known to 
man. ‘The names of these monoliths and the nature 
of the worship do not admit of description. The 
mountain-top commands a view of all the surround- 
ing valleys and mountains, as well as most of the 
ruins of the city. The outlook is sublime. It is a 
scene to stir in one’s heart those emotions which have 
ever led man to worship his Creator. On a peak 
near-by are the broken remains of a Crusader’s cas- 
tle. Further off to the left rises a black lava moun- 
tain. On its summit, glistening beneath the burn- 
ing rays of the Arabian sun, we saw a small white 
dome, white like the bleached skeletons we passed 
in crossing the desert between Akaba and the moun- 
tains of Edom. This peak is Mount Hor, and the 
dome a part of a mosque built by the Bedouins over 
the traditional tomb of Aaron, high priest of the 
Israelites and brother of Moses. We spent a day 
ascending it and upon reaching the summit found 
a Turkish flag flying over Aaron’s tomb. As a 
propitiation before any important event takes place, 
the desert Arabs climb Mount Hor with their sacri- 
fice of a sheep and cut its throat before the tomb of 








A ROSE-RED CITY 211 


Aaron. Although no news of it reached the outside 
world at the time, the far-flung battle-lines of the 
Great War reached even to the slopes of Mount Hor. 

All the buildings of this city of ghosts have elabo- 
rate facades, but within they are simple and austere. 
The magnitude and beauty of them even now strikes 
one with awe. How much more they must have 
meant to beauty-worshipers in the days when the city 
pulsed with life! Most of the stone is rose-colored 
when the sun falls upon it, and shot with blue and 
porphyry. ‘The deserted streets are rich with laurels 
and oleanders, whose hues seem copied from the rock 
itself. In fact, the only inhabitants of this rose-red 
city for hundreds of years have been the countless 
millions of brilliant wild flowers that flourish in the 
cracks of the hundreds of former palaces and temples 
and wind themselves around half-ruined columns. 
Petra’s mighty men and beautiful women have 
passed on to that undiscovered country from whose 
bourne no traveler returns. It is indeed a scene to im- 
press one with evanescence of all life. 


The worldly hopes men set their hearts upon 
Turn ashes, or they prosper, 

And anon like snow upon the desert’s dusty face 
Lighting a little hour or two—are gone. 


In the center of the city, surrounded on all sides 
by temples and palaces and tombs, is a great amphi- 
theater, cut out of the base of the same mountain 
that leads to the great high place of sacrifice, Tiers 


212 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


and tiers of seats face the mountain avenues of tombs. 
The diameter of the stage is 120 feet, and the theater 
is the one symbol of life and mirth in all this myste- 
rious deserted city. The laughter and cheers of 
thousands once rang here across this hollow cemetery 
of ancient hopes and ambitions. Here thousands 
of years ago the Irvings and Carusos of that bygone 
age performed and received the plaudits of their ad- 
miring thousands. Where now are all the gay 
throngs who occupied these tiers on feast-days and 
watched the games? The lizards are crawling over 
the exquisitely colored seats to-night, and the only 
sounds that have been heard in the theater for 
centuries have been the desolate howls of jackals. 
Little did the ancient Edomites or Nabateans im- 
agine that a people called Americans from an un- 
known continent would one day wander among the 
ruins of their proud city. 


It seems no work of man’s creative hand 
By labour wrought as wavering fancy planned; 
But from the rock as if by magic grown; 
Eternal, silent, beautiful, alone. 

_ All rosy-red, as if the blush of dawn 
That first beheld it were not yet withdrawn, 
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe 
Which man deemed old two thousand years ago. 
Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime; 
A rose-red city, half as old as Time.* 


1By Dean Burgon (fellow of Oriel and afterward vicar of 
Mary’s), prize poem, Newdegate, 1845. 





A ROSE-RED CITY 213 


The presence of Egyptian architecture and sym- 
bols indicates that Petra must have been built by a 
race that had come in contact with the culture of the 
peoples who carved the Sphinx and piled up the 
pyramids. Even the desert traditions of nomencla- 
ture support the belief that Petra was at some time 
identified with Egypt. The nomads believe that 
these rocks were carved by Jinn, under the order of 
one of the Pharaohs, and not only are they certain 
that the great urn on El Khazneh contains the wealth 
of the old Egyptian tyrants but they believe that 
they actually lived in Petra and call a ruined temple 
down in the valley Kasra Firaun, the Palace of 
Pharaoh. But nobody knows when or by whom 
Petra was built. Some think that it had its begin- 
ning long before the time of Abraham and was an 
old city when the Israelites fled from Egyptian 
bondage. , 

As we stand there amid the ruins of this forgotten 
city, we are reminded that 


When you and I behind the veil are passed, 

Oh, but the long, long while the world shall last, 
Which of our coming and departure heeds, 

As the seven seas shall heed a pebble cast. 


The region around Petra was known as Mount 
Seir in the time of Abraham, and it is said that Esau, 
with his followers, came to this country after he had 
lost his birthright. We read in the Old Testament 
about Petra. It is called Sela, which is Hebrew for 


214 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


rock. It is believed that when the children of Israel 
were wandering in the Wilderness they came upon 
Petra and asked for permission to enter andrest. But 
the people of Petra refused, and Israel’s prophets 
predicted its desolation. Obadiah accused it of be- 
ing proud and haughty, saying: “Though thou 
mount on high as the eagle, and though thy nest be 
set among the stars, I will bring thee down from 
thence, saith the Lord.” In the time of Isaiah it was 
a proud and voluptuous city, of which the stern old 
Jew predicted destruction. 

The Nabatzxans, an ancient Arab tribe, conquered 
Edom, and by 100 B. c. had created a powerful king- 
dom extending north to Damascus, west to Gaza in 
Palestine, and far into Central Arabia. Jawrence 
told me that the Nabatzans were great pirates who 
sailed down the African coast and made devastating 
raids on the Sudan. They had reached a high stage 
of civilization, did beautiful glass-work, made fine 
cloth, and modeled pottery. They frequently visited 
Rome and Constantinople. Both King Solomon 
and the queen of Sheba had employed the Nabatzans, 
who rivaled even the Palmyrians in organizing a rich 
caravan trade and made Petra their principal com- 
mercial center in Arabia. Antigonus visited Petra 
in 801 B.c. and found there large quantities of frank- 
incense, myrrh, and silver. 

The Greeks, knowing of this fortress city impreg~ 
nable in its mountains, were the first to name it Petra, 
which means rock. ‘Tradition says that Alexander 





Bie ei. 3 


A ROSE-RED CITY 215 


the Great conquered all the then known world and 
wept because there were no more worlds to conquer. 
But tradition is wrong. Here is one city that Alex- 
ander the Great failed to conquer. Diodurus Sicu- 
lus tells us that Alexander considered Petra of such 
importance that he sent Demetrius with an army to 
capture it. Demetrius tried to force his way into it 
by the same narrow defile through which we entered. 
But the inhabitants shut themselves up in their moun- 
tain fastness and successfully defied both siege and 
assault. Although the city refused itself to the visitor 
who came with the sword, it welcomed him who came 
with the olive-branch. 

As the capital of the Nabateans, it rose to its 
zenith in the second century before Christ. Greek 
geographers of those days called the land of Edom by 
the name “Arabia Petrea.” Under Aretas IIT, 
surnamed Philhellene or friend of the Greeks, the 
first royal coins were struck, and Petra assumed 
many of the aspects of Greek culture. Even in the 
golden age of Rome when Augustus sat on the throne 
of the Cesars the fame of this far-away city had 
reached Europe. It was a Mecca for tourists from 
all over the world, and it must have had a population 
of several hundred thousand souls. It was a seat of 
arts and learning to which the Praxiteleses, the 
Michelangelos, and the Leonardo da Vincis of that 
day repaired. Its hospitality was a byword among 
the ancients. It opened its doors to the early Chris- 
tians, who were permitted to have their houses of 


216 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


worship there side by side with the temples of Baal, 
Apollo, and Aphrodite. Petra was to this part of 
Asia what Rome was to the Romans and Athens to 
the Greeks. In a.p. 105 one of Trajan’s generals 
conquered Petra and created the Roman province of 
Arabia Petra, but the city continued to flourish as 
a trade-center under the strong peace of Rome. In 
those days Petra was the focusing-point on the cara- 
van routes from the interior of Arabia, Persia, and 
India to Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. It was a 
great safe-deposit of fabulous wealth, fortressed by 
frowning cliffs. Both Strabo and Pliny described 
it as a great city. But when Roman power waned, 
the Romanized Nabateans were unable to withstand 
the desert hordes. The caravan trade was diverted 
through other channels; Petra declined in impor- 
tance and ultimately was forgotten. In the twelfth 
century the Crusaders, under Baldwin I, sent an ex- 
pedition through the locality and built many castles; 
they were expelled by Saladin. 

There are many indications that Petra was a pleas- 
ant and pleasure-loving city. Its wealthier classes 
must have lived in luxury such as even the luxurious 
East has not known in many centuries. With its 
concert-halls, its circuses, its mystic groves, its priests 
and priestesses of many sensual religions, its wealth 
of flowers, its brilliant sunshine, and its delightful 
climate, it must have been at the same time the Paris 
and the Riviera of Asia Minor. But, except for its 
immortal sculpture and the few casual tributes to it 





A ROSE-RED CITY 217 


by writers from alien lands, it has not left a single 
record of its manner of. living, or handed down the 
mame of a single one of its Homers or its Horaces. 


Rose-red there lies, and vivid in the sun, 
A magic city, hid in Araby; 

Of her no ancient legend has been spun, 
And all her past the silent years have won 
To the deep coffers of antiquity. 


About her brooding stillness there blow 

The scarlet windflowers, as a carpet flung 
Upon the stones. And oleanders grow 

Where, in the night, the mourning jackals go 
A-prowl through temples of a god unsung. 


‘nd so she stands, and centuries have kept 
Her olden secret, tragic or sublime; 

Without her gates, what tides of men have swept, 
Within her portals, race of kings have slept? 
This “rose-red city, half as old as Time.” 


Was there no poet’s voice to chant her pride, 
To clarion her magic down the years? 

No warrior famed, to set her valourous stride? 
No splendid lovers who for love’s sake died, 
Gifting to song their passion and their tears? 


Was there no storied woman’s golden face 
To glimmer down unnumbered years to come? 
No prophet’s vision to foretell her place, 
Mysterious city of forgotten race? 

Only her beauty speaks, and it is dumb. 


218 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


And so she stands, while Time holds jealously 
Her olden secret, tragic or sublime; 

Her sorrows, joys, her strength, her frailty 
Are in the coffers of antiquity, 

This “rose-red city, half as old as Time.” ? 


A little more than a century ago, John Lewis 
Burckhardt, a Swiss traveler, who had heard rumors 
of a great city of rock, lying far out on the fringe of 
the Arabian Desert, penetrated the gorge and found 
once more this wonderful old city of Petra, which 
had not been mentioned in any literary record since 
A.D. 536. In the century or more since Burckhardt 
wrote of his discovery of the rock city in a letter from 
Cairo, only a comparatively few travelers and arche- 
ologists from the West have visited Petra. The 
danger of violence from Bedouin nomads was so 
great that not many had the zeal to attempt it. The 
lion and the lizard kept the court where Jamshyd 
gloried and drank deep, until Lawrence brought his 
fighting Bedouins into this city of tombs and empty 
palaces. 


2 Mona Mackay, Christchurch, New Zealand. 








CHAPTER XIX 


A BEDOUIN BATTLE IN A CITY OF GHOSTS 


/ WHE possession of Petra is necessary to the 
holding of Akaba, the most important stra- 
tegical point on the west coast of Arabia, 

where the great fleets of King Solomon rode at an- 

chor three thousand years ago. But Lawrence’s 
battle was the first fought in Petra in the last seven 
hundred years. ‘The Crusaders, with their flashing 
spears and pennants blazoned with the coats of arms 
of half the medieval barons of Europe, were the last 
warriors to clank in armor through the ribbon-like 
gorge. Lawrence, the archeologist, garbed in Arab 
kit, had wandered over this country before the war 
and knew every foot of the region from the driest 
water-hole to the most dilapidated column in Petra. 
After he had forced the Turks to surrender at Akaba, 
he was determined to capture all the approaches to 
the high plateau which begins fifty miles inland from 
the head of the gulf of Akaba and crosses Arabia to 
the Persian Gulf. At the same time the Turks real- 
ized that they must either recapture Akaba or recon- 
cile themselves to the loss of all Holy Arabia. So 
they brought ten thousand fresh troops from Syria 
and stationed them at the various strategical posi- 


tions on this plateau. But Lawrence was certain 
219 


220 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


that the Turks would never be able to retake Akaba, 
because there is only one feasible avenue of approach 
for an army by land to that ancient seaport—down 
the WadilIthm. ‘To be sure, he had marched his own 
irregular army through the same gorge a few weeks 
before, but he had caught the ‘'urks napping and 
swept down on Akaba before they were aware of 
their danger. He had no intention of giving the 
Turks a similar opportunity. ‘The Wadi Ithm is one 
of the most formidable passes in the world for an 
armed force to enter; it is as difficult of accesses 
as the famous Khyber Pass between India and 
Afghanistan. It penetrates the barren volcanic 
range called King Solomon’s Mountains, which ex- 
tends along the eastern shore of the Gulf of Akaba 
and rises a sheer five thousand feet on either side of 
the pass. An invading army, if attacked from the 
tops of the peaks crowning its sides, would have no 
protection. Lawrence would have annihilated any 
Turkish force attempting to advance on Akaba 
through the Wadi Ithm. 

From July until the middle of September, 1917, 
the Turks were quiet. Then they made several re- 
connaissances around Petra in an effort to dupe 
Lawrence and the Arabs into believing they were 
going to attack Petra, although their real intention 
was to advance direct on Akaba. The last of these 
three reconnaissances was a gloomy affair for the 
Turks; Lawrence and his men cut off and wiped out 
one hundred of the scouting-party. 








A BEDOUIN BATTLE 221 


Fifteen miles northeast of Petra an old Crusader 
castle frowns down on the desert from a steep hill 
of white chalk. It is known as Shobek. Baldwin I, 
king of Jerusalem, built a great wall all the way 
around the crest of the mountain in the days of the 
Crusaders. Both the castle and the modern Arab 
village are within the wall, and the only approach to 
the summit is up a winding precipitous trail. Shobek 
was still in the hands of the Turks, but Lawrence’s 
spies brought him word that the garrison was made 
up entirely of Syrians, all men of Arabian blood, in 
sympathy with the new Nationalist movement. So 
Lawrence sent Malud and ten of his lieutenants to 
Shobek by night, followed by Shereef Abd el Mu’in 
and two hundred Bedouins. 

The Syrians in a body transferred their allegiance 
to him. Next morning the combined Syrian and 
Arabian forces descended the chalk mountain and 
destroyed three hundred rails on a side-line of the 
Damascus-Medina Railway, near Aneiza. They 
also tried to capture the terminus of this spur, where 
seven hundred Armenian wood-cutters, whom they’ 
wanted to rescue, were at work. But this time the 
Turks had erected such strong fortifications around 
the terminus that, although the Arabs and Syrian 
deserters took the Turkish outposts, they were un- 
able to capture the main positions. The Turks, 
badly frightened, sent couriers to Maan and Abu 
el Lissal asking for reinforcements. By weakening 
their garrison at Abu el Lissal the Turks played 


222 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


directly into Lawrence’s hands, for as soon as the 
Turkish reserves arrived Lawrence called his men 
back to Petra from the railway. 

After the desertion of the entire Shobek garrison 
and Lawrence’s bold sortie against the railway ter- 
minus, Djemal Pasha, commander-in-chief of the 
Turkish armies in Syria, Palestine, and Arabia, de- 
cided, against the advice of Field-Marshal von Fal- 
kenhayn, then German generalissimo in the Near 
East, that before he could hope to recapture Gueirra 
and Akaba it would be necessary to retake Petra. 
Djemal transferred a crack cavalry regiment, an in- 
fantry brigade, and several organizations of light 
artillery from Palestine down the Hedjaz Railway 
to Maan. This was a clever strategic coup for 
Lawrence. First, the Germans and Turks had to 
diminish their forces opposing Allenby in the Holy 
Land. Secondly, they were walking into the trap 
which had been set for them; because it was Law- 
rence’s belief that if a battle were fought by his ir- 
regular Bedouin troops in the mountain fastnesses 
of ancient Edom, the superior mobility of his army 
would eventually enable him to defeat any division 
of methodically trained regulars in the world. 

Malud Bey, Lawrence’s first in command at the 
battle of Petra, was one of the most interesting fig- 
ures of the Arabian revolt, as well as one of the 
most picturesque. He wore very high purple-topped 
Kafir boots—like Jack the Giant-Killer must have 
worn; also spurs that jangled musically as he strode 


‘ 





A BEDOUIN BATTLE 223 


about, a long medieval sword, and a long mustachio, 
which he tugged like the villain of a melodrama. 
But there was no more charming and gallant officer 
in the whole Arabian army. He was the son of a 
Bedouin sheik and a Circassian concubine and from 
boyhood had been an ardent Arab Nationalist. He 
made a thorough study of modern military science 
in order that some day he might help to overthrow 
the Turk, and he even went so far as to spend three 
years studying at the Turkish Staff College before 
they discovered his revolutionary leanings and ex- 
pelled him. Then he went into the desert and be- 
came secretary to Ibn Rashid, one of the potentates 
of Central Arabia. There Malud participated in 
scores of raids and earned such a reputation as a 
fighter that the Turks forgave him his past sins and 
invited him to return and join their cavalry. At 
the outbreak of the World War he was raised to the 
rank of captain, but he was later court-martialed and 
imprisoned for taking part in a conspiracy against 
the sultan. After his release he fought the British 
in Mesopotamia and was captured by them near 
Basra. Eventually he was allowed to join Feisal. 
He was wounded in every single engagement in 
which he took part, because he was so foolhardy that 
he would not hesitate to charge the Turkish army 
by himself. | 
Djemal Pasha selected Maan, the most important 
station on the Hedjaz Railway between the Dead 
Sea of Medina, as the starting-point for three col- 


224 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


umns comprising over seven thousand men, several 
units of light artillery, and a squadron of German 
aéroplanes. One column made the Crusaders’ castle 
at Shobek its base; another came up from the south 
by the way of Abu el Lissal and Busta; and the third 
moved direct from Maan on the east. The Turks 
directed the movements of their columns so that they 
would all converge on Petra on October 21. 

In the meantime Lawrence and his Bedouins were 
comfortably and safely lodged in the ancient capital 
of the Nabatzans, behind those mighty rocky ram- 
parts which had defied the armies of Alexander the 
Great. For the first time in many centuries the 
silent avenues throbbed with life. Camp-fires were 
lighted on the old altars of the gods; and sentinels 
stationed on the ancient great high places watched 
for the coming of the Turks. In the vast echoing 
chambers of the tombs the Arabs sat around in circles 
until late at night, telling interminable stories and 
singing old chants of epic battles. Lawrence him- 
self occupied princely headquarters, the Temple of 
Isis (El Khazneh), the rose-tinted palace at the en- 
trance of the gorge. If he wished he could have 
used his archeological imagination and repeopled 
the gloomy hall with the vision of handmaidens of 
Isis dancing before the shrine of their goddess. 

Instead, he sent for Sheik Khallil of Elgi, a 
neighboring village, and told him it would be neces- 
sary to summon all the able-bodied women for miles 
around to help reinforce his troops. Arabian women 





A BEDOUIN BATTLE 225 


may not have gone in for Red Cross work and wom- 
en’s motor-corps or canteen service, as their Western 
sisters did during the war, but they have always en- 
couraged their men to fight. In the incessant tribal 
warfare they are often in the rear, encouraging their 
men with praise, chanting songs of Bedouin heroes, 
and shrieking words of blame if their own men-folk 
are not gallantly charging into the thick of the fray. 
A. few centuries ago the fighting forces of the desert 
always had two or three of their women dressed in 
resplendent robes to act as standard-bearers. ‘This, 
however, was the first time in Arabian history 
that armed battalions of women actually engaged in 
battle. 

The Bedouin women living in the vicinity of Petra 
rose magnificently to the emergency. ‘They dropped 
their butter-making and their weaving and thronged 
to Lawrence’s headquarters under the leadership of 
Sheik Khallil’s wife. No smart uniforms with braid 
and buttons for the Bedouin Amazons! Barefooted, 
with long blue cotton robes, wearing gold bracelets 
and rings in their ears and noses, they gathered from 
all quarters to form their Battalion of Death. Rally- 
ing to the call of Lawrence, who had few men at 
his disposal, they fought with as great valor as their 
husbands and brothers and played a vital part m 
routing the Turks. 

Lawrence, remembering the stout defense put up 
by the old Nabatzan kings, when Alexander’s army 
failed to capture Petra, stationed the Bedouin women 


226 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


at the narrow gorge opposite the Temple of Isis to 
defend the city. ‘The women were fierce in their en- 
thusiasm and needed no coaching to make them 
capable musketeers. ‘They hid behind the pillars of 
the temple, some of them with their half-grown chil- 
dren, and covered with their rifles the gorge, which 

was so narrow that only a few Turks and Germans 
- could march through abreast. 'The women held their 
ground and were not even panic-stricken when Ger- 
man aéroplanes swooped down over the rock temples 
and dropped bombs on the streets, theater and water- 
circus. They clutched their rifles only the more 
tightly when one German bomb made a direct hit 
on an Arabian machine-gun, causing the Maxim and 
its crew to vanish as though spirited away. 'Through- 
out the whole battle Lawrence commanded from the 
top of the north ridge. He had with him a force of 
fifty Bedouin youths, who were selected for their 
speed as runners and who proved most valuable as 
orderlies. They could sprint like hares and clamber 
about the rocks with the agility of the oryx. If one 
had viewed the battle from the Arabian positions and 
seen only the women and the Bedouin men dressed 
in every conceivable desert costume, mounted on 
horses and camels without saddles, and using nearly 
every weapon invented by man from the dawn of 
time, if one could have eliminated the modern note 
provided by the trench-helmets and commonplace 
lead-colored uniforms of the Turks and by their 
squadron of aéroplanes, one might easily have mis- 











A, BEDOUIN BATTLE 227 


taken the battle of Petra for a clash between the 
ancient Edomites and the kings of Israel. 

Lawrence had only two mountain-guns and two 
machine-guns, but with these he held the first ridge 
five miles south of Petra for over six hours and killed 
sixty Turks, with practically no casualties on his side. 
Then, when the enemy attack had fully developed, 
when the Turks and Germans were advancing 
straight up the ridge in spite of the fire of the Arabs, 
Lawrence vacated it and sent half his men to occupy 
a ridge a little nearer Petra to the south, and the 
other half to a ridge on the opposite side of the valley 
on the north. Between his two companies ran the 
wide part of the Wadi Musa, a mile distant from the 
point where it narrows down and becomes a mere 
cleft through the mountain wall south of the city. 

The Turks, elated at having captured the trenches 
on the first ridge, were certain that they had decisively 
beaten Lawrence’s forces; so they charged enthusi- 
astically over the summit and down into the valley, 
thinking the Arabs had surely retired all the way 
into Petra. Meanwhile, Lawrence and his men were 
hiding in ambush on the hills of Petra. He per- 
mitted at least a thousand of the enemy’s troops to 
push headlong into the gorge before he gave the 
order to fire. When he had the Turks wedged into 
the narrowest part of the gorge, near the entrance to 
the city, one of his aides fired a rocket into the air as 
a signal for the Arabs to attack. A moment later 
pandemonium broke loose in the mountains of Edom. 


228 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


The Arabs poured in a stream of fire from all sides, 
The crack of rifles seemed to come from every rock. 
With shrill screams the women and children tumbled 
huge boulders over the edge on the heads of the 
Turks and Germans hundreds of feet below. ‘Those 
stationed behind the columns of the Temple of Isis 
kept up a steady fire. Utterly bewildered, the in- 
vaders became panicky and scattered in all possible 
directions, while the Arabs on the ridges continued 
to devastate their broken ranks. 

A few minutes before the sun declined behind the 
rose-colored mountains, Lawrence and Malud Bey 
sent up a second signal to their followers. 

“Up, children of the desert!” shouted Malud. 

Crouching figures sprang from behind the rocks 
on all sides. “Allah! Allah!” came the answer from 
the throats of hundreds of Bedouins as they swept 
down the ridges into the valley. | 

The Arabs captured the entire Turkish transport, 
a complete field-hospital, and hundreds of prisoners. 
One body of over a thousand Turks, who succeeded 
in retreating to Busta in fair order, fought their way 
back several days later to Abu el Lissan and to 
Maan. 

After the battle, Lawrence slipped through the 
Turkish lines in disguise and returned with a copy 
of the Turkish communiqué describing the battle. 
It brought roars of laughter from the victorious 
Arabs. It ran: 





A. BEDOUIN BATTLE 229 


We have stormed the fortifications of Petra, losing twelve 
killed and ninety-four wounded. The Arab losses are one 
thousand dead and wounded, and we counted seventeen 
British officers among the bodies. 


The only British officers, except Lawrence, who 
were in that part of Arabia at the time were many 
miles away, at Akaba. Lawrence himself had worn 
his Arab robes. His losses were twenty-eight killed 
and wounded. The Turks had made a little error 
of 972 in their estimate. 


CHAPTER XX 


THE RELATIVE IN MY HOUSE 


: Pieses the reason why women played 


such a small part in the war in the Land of 

the Arabian Nights,” explained Colonel 
Lawrence, “was because their men-folk wear the 
skirts and are prejudiced against petticoats.” ‘Then 
adding philosophically: ‘Perhaps that is one of the 
reasons why I am so fond of Arabia. So far as I 
know, it is the only country left where men rule!” 
But Colonel Lawrence denies the assertion madé 
by another authority on Arabia that man is the ab- 
solute master and woman a mere slave. Although 
“she is the object of his sensual pleasures, a toy with 
which he plays whenever and however he pleases’; 
although “knowledge is his, ignorance is hers’; al- 
though “the firmament and the light are his, dark- 
ness and the dungeon are hers’; and although “his 
is to command, hers is blindly to obey,” she still 
wields a vast indirect influence. But one sees and 
hears very little of her. Arabia is one country, 
indeed, where the equal suffrage propaganda of Mrs. 
Catt and Mrs. Pankhurst has made little headway. 
Although the king of the Hedjaz figures in the 


cable news, his queen, Gellaleta el Melika, is never 
230 | 





RELATIVE IN MY HOUSE 231 


mentioned. Emir Feisal attended the Versailles 
Peace Conference as the head of the Arabian delega- 
tion, but his wife, who shortly afterward became the 
first queen of a new dynasty in Bagdad, did not 
accompany him. 

Hussein Ibn Ali’s capital is one city where EKuro- 
pean and American diplomatists and their wives are 
not welcome. Just imagine how dull life in London 
and New York would become if the customs of 
Mecca were suddenly adopted. There would be no 
charming stenographers, no coquettish midinettes, no 
dancing in hotels and restaurants, no charity bazaars, 
and no feminine politicians. 

Where we rise when a woman enters the room, an 
Arab never does. In fact, he will not even eat with 
a woman, but, of course, she is expected to serve him. 
When an Arab prince goes out “to smell the air” on 
his camel, his wife does not accompany him. In fact, 
the women of the towns rarely leave the harem 
oftener than once a week. In Jeddah, for instance, 
on Thursday afternoon they stroll outside the city 
wall to the tomb of Mother Eve. But, in spite of 
their secluded lives, many a veiled beauty of Arabia 
has played a subtle part in politics and has by no 
means been satisfied with conquests of love. Many, 
indeed, have been the successors to the queen of 
Sheba who, by their wisdom as well as their charm, 
have made their lords and masters kiss the dust be- 
neath their feet. 

The Koran permits a man to have four wives at 


232 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


a time, but a Moslem usually marries only one un- 
less he is rich enough to provide a separate house for 
others. Of course, this only refers to the townsmen. 
Hard as it may be to believe, it is, nevertheless, true 
that the average Mussulman actually finds it diffi- 
cult to get along peacefully with four wives all under 
the same roof! The Koran also conveniently per- 
mits him to have as many concubines and slave-girls 
as his right hand can hold. Mohammed himself is 
said to have had eleven wives and several concubines; 
and, although it may be difficult for a stream to rise 
higher than its source, it is, nevertheless, a fact that 
among the more intelligent city dwellers of to-day 
polygamy, concubinage, and slavery are dying out. 
King Hussein, King Feisal, Emir Ali, and the Sul- 
tan Abdullah of Transjordania, and most of the 
prominent present-day leaders in Arabia, have but 
one wife each. 

An Arab woman can be divorced for not having 
a son; she not only can be, but frequently is. An 
Arab seldom speaks of a woman as his wife. He 
calls her “the relative in my house,” or “the mother 
of my son Ali.” Girl babies are usually not very 
welcome. But when a child is born, no matter what 
the sex, the first precaution taken is to protect the 
babe from the influence of the evil eye. ‘This is 
done by hanging a charm about its neck. Mothers 
also have a prejudice against curly hair and do every- 
thing possible to straighten out any stubborn kinks 
in a baby’s locks. 





RELATIVE IN MY HOUSE 233 


In some parts of the desert there is an unwritten 
law that if a girl is attacked by a man between sun- 
rise and noon the man shall be flogged severely; if 
between noon and sunset, he is merely fined; and 
if during the night, when all are supposed to be in 
their tents under the protection of their families, 
the man is not subject to punishment. 

A man usually marries between the ages of twenty 
and twenty-four, and a woman any time after she is 
twelve. Professional matchmakers in Arabia do not 
perform their services gratuitously and unsolicited 
as they do in Europe and America. Whena Moslem 
wants to take unto himself a helpmate he hires the 
services of a matronly lady who is an arranger of 
marriages by profession. He pays a certain sum 
for his bride; how much is always a matter of spirited 
argument. He never sees his fiancée until after the 
orange-blossoms and old shoes—and then it’s too 
late. The bride’s mother does n’t call in the neigh- 
bors and a professional dressmaker to study the 
trousseau patterns in “Vogue” or “The Ladies’ 
Home Journal.” She merely borrows a cashmere 
shawl for her daughter. 

One of the few careers open to a woman of the 
Near East to-day is that of acting as a professional 
mourner. Often the mourners wail for days; and the 
wail, which sounds like the cry of a lost soul, usually 
ends in a piercing shriek which makes your blood run 
cold. 


The customs of immediate burial often result in 


a 

234 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 
complications. There is a bazaar story told in Jeddah 
to the effect that a Scot, who was stationed there 
early in the war, passed away as a result of some 
mysterious malady. He was carried a short distance 
outside the city and buried in the sand near the shore, 
wrapped in nothing but a Union Jack. A few hours 
before the funeral a boat left Jeddah Harbor, and it 
carried an official memorandum to the Government 
in London telling of the death of the officer. After 
the ceremony the mourners were returning to the 
city when suddenly they -heard shouts and, turning, 
were panic-stricken to see the corpse running toward 
them, swathed in the Union Jack. It seems that the 
Scot had merely been in a trance, and, a few moments 
after he was buried in the loose sand, land-crabs at- 
tacked him and brought him back to life. But, not 
satisfied at letting the yarn go at this, they tell how 
the Scot was afterward arrested in London for im- 
personating himself when he called at his bank to 
cash a check. 

Between the nomad woman of the tents and the 
townswoman there is even more difference than be- 
tween a wiry desert patriarch and his corpulent city 
cousin. ‘'Townswomen are fat and white, while the 
Bedouin women are thin and tanned. Many 
Bedouin sheiks have four wives at a time. Some of 
the richest chieftains have as many as fifty wives 
during a lifetime, but never more than four at once. 
One reason why they so frequently indulge them- 
selves the luxury of three or four is because it means 





aw oa l¥ 
Ser em 


RELATIVE IN MY HOUSE 235 


easier housework. The Bedouin women all live in 
the same tent, too; and, strangely enough, jealousy 
is uncommon. ‘They do not regard a husband as ex- 
clusive property as we do. 

Bedouin women are much more ignorant and prej- 
udiced than their men-folk, and they spend no small 
part of their time urging the men to fight. It is 
they who keep the century-old blood-feuds alive. 

The desert nomads have no way of marking time; 
no Sundays, no Mondays, no 1924’s and no 1925’s, 
They are born: “It is the will of Allah.” Then 
they grow up and after a while they die: “It is the 
will of Allah.” ‘That is all there is toit: “It is the 
will of Allah.” So itis n’t bad form to ask a Bedouin 
woman her age, for she doesn’t know whether she 
is sweet sixteen or a Mrs. Methuselah. 

They are all frightfully talkative, and whenever 
we were seated on the men’s side of the thin parti- 
tion which divides the goat’s-hair home of a Bedouin 
sheik, talking about Western customs, such as women 
walking along city streets unveiled, or attending the 
theater in company with their gentlemen friends, or 
playing golf, his wives would pop their heads up 
over the partition and remark: “How disgusting! 
How vulgar! How beastly!” 

Despite the example set by the Arabs themselves, 
Colonel Lawrence scrupulously avoided free talk 
about women. It is as difficult a subject as religion. 

On one occasion, when seated in Sheik Auda Abu 
Tayi’s tent, Lawrence was in an unusually talkative 


236 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


frame of mind and was giving his host a racy descrip- 
tion of cabaret life in London. Every few minutes 
Auda would slap his knee and roar: “By Jove! I 
wish I were there!” ‘Then his wives would break in 
and upbraid him bitterly. 

The Bedouin women usually retain their beauty 
until their thirties, but after that! They are all short 
and thin. They take all their pleasures in their tents. 
The Bedouin women of the desert are not veiled, but 
they tattoo their faces and paint their lips blue. On 
all occasions they wear a garment of dark blue cotton 
and keep their hair covered. Mohammed objected 
to women exposing their hair in public. 

All Arabs are fond of buying pearls or trinkets of 
hammered gold for their women. Some of their 
wives wear gold ornaments worth £1000 or more. 
According to the unwritten law of Arabia, all orna- 
ments are the personal property of a woman, and 
if divorced she keeps them. If an Arab wants to 
divorce his wife, he simply says three times before 
witnesses: “I divorce thee! I divorce thee! I di- 
vorce thee!” Consequently, all the women are fore- 
sighted enough to insist on having their possessions 
in portable form. 

The training of the Bedouin women is entirely in 
the tents. They spend much of their time milking 
their camels and goats and making butter. ‘To do 
the latter they get the milk in curds, which they 
squeeze in their hands and put on the tent-roofs until 
all the moisture drops out. When it dries it becomes 





RELATIVE IN MY HOUSE 237 


as hard as a rock. In fact, their butter is so hard 
that it will even turn the edge of a knife! Lawrence 
would pulverize it between stones and mix it with 
water until it resembled malted milk. 

Many Bedouins regard women as the source of all 
evil and say that hell is full of them. The verses of 
a few desert poets breathe hatred for women rather 
than love. Here is a verse from one of Sir Richard 
Burton’s translations: 


They said, marry. 

I said I am free; 

Why take unto my bosom 

A sackful of snakes? 

May Allah never bless womankind! 


It is a simple matter for a Bedouin woman to 
clean house or move. ‘The tribe leaves one bit of the 
desert as soon as the pasturage in the vicinity is ex- 
hausted. The more aristocratic Bedouins have 
neither sheep nor goats—only camels and _ horses. 
They limit themselves to the least possible amount 
of possessions and refuse to be tied down to any 
one spot. They have the fewest wants and are the 
freest of all the peoples of the earth. 

Sheik Nuri Shalaan once asked to be told some- 
thing about European customs. “Well, 1f you come 
- to my house in England,” said Lawrence, “my 
women will serve you with tea.” Whereupon Nuri 
clapped his hands for one of his wives, ordered her 
to make tea, and invited Lawrence into the women’s 


238 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


quarters to drink it, an act entirely contrary to the 
unwritten law of the desert. 

The Bedouins are exceedingly courteous, and no 
matter how apalling your Arabic they will never 
presume to correct you. When you call at a 
Bedouin tent you make all of your polite speeches 
right away, and then when you leave you may get 
up and brush off without saying a word of farewell. 
I have seen Bedouins call on Lawrence in his tent 
when he was reading. He would greet them, and 
then they would crouch down on their heels and he 
would resume his book. After a while they would 
get up and silently walk out. But Lawrence him- 
self would never leave so long as a guest was there. 

Al Ghazzali, the great theologian of Islam of the 
eleventh century, said, “Marriage is a kind of slav- 
ery, for the wife becomes the slave of her husband, 
and it is her duty, absolutely, to obey him in every- 
thing he requires of her except in what is contrary 
to the laws of Islam.” Wife-beating is allowed by 
the Koran. All female slaves taken in war may be- 
come the private property of the man who wins them. 
There is an old tradition that a lie is excusable in 
three circumstances: in war, to reconcile friends, and 
to women. 

To the average Arab, heaven is an oasis with date- 
palms, sparkling fountains, and racing camels, where 
every male angel may have as many concubines as 
he desires. So is it any wonder that the Arab and 
the Turk are splendid fighters when we realize that 





RELATIVE IN MY HOUSE 239 


if they die in battle against the unbeliever they will 
go direct to such a paradise? 

In that land of romance and mystery, of palm- 
trees, camels, and veiled women, custom, founded on 
the teachings of the Prophet, relegates the gentler 
sex to an inferior position not only in this world but 
in the hereafter as well. But, despite this, there are 
many Arabs who make love just as ardently as their 
enslaved brethren in other lands, and nearly all Ara- 
bian poets draw their inspiration from the loveliness 
of woman. 


My heart is firmer than the roots of mountains, 
My fame pervasive as the smell of musk. 

My pleasure is in hunting the wild lion, 

The beast of prey I visit in his den. 

Yet all the while a gentle fawn has snared me, 
A heifer from the pastures of Khazam. 


CHAPTER XXI 


THROUGH THE TURKISH LINES IN DISGUISE 


EKARLY all Arabs carry some sort of good 
N luck charm, and the belief in jinn or genii 

is still common. The talisman which Auda 
wore round his neck was probably one of the most 
extraordinary to be found in all Arabia. The amulet 
was a diminutive copy of the Koran about one inch 
square, for which he paid more than two hundred 
pounds. One day he displayed it with great pride, 
and Lawrence discovered it had been printed in Glas- 
gow and, according to the price marked inside the 
cover, had been issued at eighteenpence. So far as 
we could make out, the only things the Bedouins are 
afraid of are snakes, and they believe that the sole 
protection against them is such a charm worn round 
the neck. 

There are thousands of reptiles in certain parts 
of the desert. The worst snake belt in the Near 
East extends from Jauf to Azrak along a chain of 
shallow wells in the North Arabian Desert, where 
one finds, usually near the water, Indian cobras, 
puff-adders, black whip-snakes, and hosts of others 
—nearly all deadly. Lawrence once started out on 


an expedition with eighteen men five of whom died 
240 





THROUGH THE TURKISH LINES 241 


on the way from snake-bite. Instead of relying on 
the usual alcoholic antidote, he, like his nomad com- 
panions, put his faith in Allah. In Arabia a snake 
will often snuggle up to a sleeping Bedouin at night 
for warmth, but it will not bite—unless the sleeper 
is unlucky enough to roll over and frighten it. Al- 
though their consciences are by no means clear, 
nearly all Bedouins, fortunately, are sound sleepers! 

Whenever Lawrence and his men reconnoitered 
in the snake belt at night they put on boots and were 
careful to beat every foot of ground and every bush 
in front of them. When an Arab is bitten, his 
friends read certain chapters of the Koran over him. 
If they happen to choose correct passages, he lives; 
but if they have no Koran, the unfortunate one in 
all likelihood dies. ’T is the will of Allah! 

Although the Arabs knew Lawrence was a Chris- 
tian, once he had gained their confidence, they often 
invited him to pray with them. This he did only 
when he felt inclined to humor them, but he had com- 
pletely memorized all the important Mohammedan 
prayers so as to be prepared for any unforeseen emer- 
gency when his declining to pray might cause em- 
barrassment to Emir Feisal and King Hussein in 
the presence of members of strange tribes. Fortu- 
nately, no such emergency ever arose. 

But when he did pray with his Bedouins on several 
occasions, just to please them, the procedure was as 
follows: Lawrence and his body-guard would kneel 
on their prayer-rugs with their faces toward Mecca. 


242 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Then with one of the sheiks acting as leader they would 
go through a ceremony consisting of rhythmic pros- 
trations and the repetition, in unison, of passages 
from the Koran. A certain number of bows are made 
in the morning, so many at noon, and still a different 
number at sunset, although the words repeated each 
time are much the same. At the end of all prayers 
Lawrence and his men would turn their heads to the 
right and then to the left before rising. Lawrence 
explained to me that two angels were supposed to 
be standing beside each person while praying. One 
angel records good deeds and the other bad deeds, 
and it is customary to salute them both. All good 
Moslems have five prayer services daily, but Law- 
rence and his men usually cut them down to three 
by telescoping two in the morning and two in the 
afternoon; otherwise the Arab army would have 
spent more time praying than fighting. 

Lawrence overcame the two greatest prejudices 
of the Bedouins; namely, that he was a foreigner and 
a Christian. Most of the foreigners these nomads 
had met were Turks whom they despised as barba- 
rians, for the Arabs are intellectual snobs. The only 
Christians they know are the native Christians of 
the Syrian coast and the Armenians, who are more 
accustomed to show the other cheek than to show 
courage; the Arabs loathe them. It suited them 
for the most part to ignore the fact that Law- 
rence was a Christian, because they consider it 
a disgrace that any Christian should outdo them 





THROUGH THE TURKISH LINES 243 


at the very things at which they ordinarily ex- 
cel. Occasionally, however, they actually invited 
him to recite his Christian prayers aloud, which he 
did most eloquently. Charles M. Doughty, the trav- 
eler and poet, so far as I know, was the only man 
other than Lawrence who ever wandered openly up 
and down Holy Arabia as a Christian. All other 
explorers in the forbidden country of the Prophet 
have disguised themselves as Moslems. Doughty 
had at least a score of narrow escapes from 
death, and that he escaped at all was due to 
the fact that he always went unarmed and did 
nothing covertly. He took no money with him and 
made his way about by healing the sick with simple 
remedies and by vaccinating Arabs. An old man 
and a great scholar, he now lives at a watering-place 
on the south coast of England. He and Lawrence 
are close friends, and the younger man gives his pred- 
ecessor full credit for “breaking the ice” and mak- 
ing it possible for him and his associates to work with 
the Bedouins during the war. In fact Doughty’s 
“Arabia Deserta” was both Lawrence’s Bible and 
military text-book during the campaign. 

The magnificent Bedouin clothes that Lawrence 
wore were not theatrical garb. They were a part 
of his carefully worked-out plan to gain complete 
mastery over the Arabs. Although he did not at- 
tempt to disguise either his religion or nationality, 
outwardly he was an Arab. Except in certain 
areas, he found that being known as a British officer 


244 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


and a Christian was less of a hindrance than full dis- 
guise. Had he desired to pass himself off as a 
Bedouin, he would have had to grow a beard, a feat 
he could not have achieved even if the fate of the 
British Empire had depended on it. However, on 
a few occasions he did disguise himself as a Bedouin 
woman and made his way through the Turkish lines. 
But to other British officers who desired to visit 
a tribe he recommended simply the Arab head- 
cloth, to be worn out of courtesy and not as a dis- 
guise. 

Bedouins have a malignant prejudice against the 
hat and believe our persistence in wearing it is 
founded on some irreligious principle. If you were 
to wear this season’s smartest Piccadilly derby or 
Austrian velours in Mecca, your friends and relatives 
would disown you. 

“Adopt the kuffieh, agal, and aba, and you will 
acquire the confidence and intimacy of the sons of 
Ishmael to a degree impossible in European garb,” 
was a Lawrence maxim. “But to don Arab kit has 
its dangers as well as its advantages. Breaches of 
etiquette, excused in a foreigner, are not condoned 
if he is in Arab clothes. You are like an English 
actor appearing for the first time in a German thea- 
ter. Even that is not a parallel, because you are 
playing a part day and night, and for an anxious 
stake. Complete success comes when theArab forgets 
your strangeness and speaks naturally before you.” 
So far as I know, Colonel Lawrence is the only Eu- 





THROUGH THE TURKISH LINES 245 


ropean who was ever accepted by the Arabs as one 
of themselves. 

His advice was that if you wear Arab dress, you 
should always wear the best, for the reason that 
clothes are significant among the tribes. “Dress 
like a shereef, if the people agree to it, and, if you 
use Arab costume at all, go the whole length. Leave 
your English friends and customs on the coast, and 
rely entirely on Arab habits. If you can surpass the 
Arabs, you have taken an immense stride toward 
complete success, but the effort of living and think- 
ing a foreign language, the rude fare, strange clothes, 
and stranger ways, with the complete loss of privacy 
and quiet and the impossibility of ever relaxing 
your watchful imitation of others for months on end, 
prove such an added strain that this course should 
not be taken without serious thought.” 

Whenever Colonel Lawrence was not engaged in 
conducting major military operations or planting 
tulips along the Hedjaz Railway, he would disguise 
himself as an outcast Arab woman and slip through 
the enemy lines. This was the best disguise for a 
spy, for the Turkish sentinels usually considered it 
beneath their dignity to say, “Stop, who goes there?” 
to a woman. ‘Time and again he penetrated hun- 
dreds of miles into enemy territory, where he ob- 
tained much of the data which finally enabled Field- 
Marshal Allenby’s Palestine army and Emir Feisal’s 
Arabian forces to overwhelm the Turks in the most 
dazzling and brilliant cavalry operation in history. 


246 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Lawrence once had a spare fortnight in which 
to make things lively for the Turks while he was 
waiting for Auda Abu Tayi to assemble his Howeitat 
warriors. Accompanied by a lone Bedouin of the 
Anazah tribe named Dahmi, he passed through the 
Turkish lines in his customary female disguise and 
made his way toward Palmyra, where he hoped to 
find an influential Bedouin sheik who was in sympa- 
thy with the Arabian revolt. This chief was a thou- 
sand miles away on the Euphrates, and so Lawrence 
and Dahmi turned their camels toward Baalbek. 
In the desert near that ancient Syrian city, famous 
for its ruined temples, which rival the Acropolis at 
Athens, lives a tribe of semi-nomads, the Metawileh, 
who were friendly to King Hussein and Emir Feisal 
although they were compelled to codperate with the 
Turks. Lawrence wanted to visit these Metawileh 
to assure himself of their assistance some months 
later when the final advance would be launched and 
when he expected the Hedjaz forces and Allenby’s 
troops to push the Turks north through Syria. His 
plan was to arouse all the nomad tribes in Syria, so 
that they would be constantly harassing the Turkish 
army from within their own lines. 

Two miles outside Baalbek, Lawrence slid down 
from his camel, took off his Arab costume, and swag- 
gered boldly into the little town in the uniform of a 
British officer without insignia. At this time Baal- 
bek was still several hundred miles north of the line 
dividing Allenby’s forces from the Turks. The 





THROUGH THE TURKISH LINES 247 


British were only a few miles north of Jerusalem. 
The Turkish troops on the streets of Baalbek saluted 
Lawrence as though he had been a German officer. 
But there was nothing unusual in this, for if a Prus- 
sian officer of the Death’s Head Hussars had passed 
Whitehall in London during the war, he, no doubt, 
would have received the salute of the Horse Guards. 
Lawrence’s theory was that it was a much simpler 
matter to go boldly and openly in uniform in rural 
Turkey than to dodge about in a suspicious manner. 
After hurriedly glancing over the fortifications 
around Baalbek, Lawrence attempted to visit the 
Turkish military school, where thousands of young 
officers were being trained. But when he reached 
the gates he observed that officers barred the way, 
and so he decided it would be safer to retreat without 
exacting a salute. 

Resuming his disguise, Lawrence went on to the 
tents of the Metawileh, where he pulled aside his 
veil and revealed his identity. The sheiks gathered 
around the new English “Prince of Mecca’ and 
clamored for a Syrian revolution at once. Lawrence 
explained that the time was not yet ripe and tried 
to encourage them to future action by glowing ac- 
counts of the victories farther south in the HedjJaz. 
However, he found the Metawileh so keen for a raid 
or a lark of some kind that he was prevailed upon 
to join them in what he always referred to as “a 
cinema show.” In his contact with the peoples of 
the desert he made the discovery that noise is one 


248 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


of the best forms of propaganda. So that night, fol- 
lowed by every able-bodied man, woman, and child 
in the tribe, Lawrence went down to the main line 
of the Turkish railway, which runs from Constanti- 
nople and Aleppo through Baalbek to Beirut. He 
selected one of the largest steel and concrete bridges 
in the Near East as the object of the evening’s di- 
version. After planting his tulips under both ends 
of the bridge and all its bastions, he carried an elec- 
tric wire, connecting all charges, to the summit of a 
near-by hill, which the people of the Metawileh were 
occupying as a grand stand. Then, at the psycho- 
logical moment, he threw in the switch and sent the 
great bridge skyward in a mass of flame and smoke. 
The Metawileh to the last man were convinced of 
the might of the Allies and swore oaths by Allah the 
Most High and by the Holy Koran, that they would 
join King Hussein’s Faithful. 

From here Lawrence and his solitary Bedouin 
companion trekked across Syria to Damascus. They 
rode through the bazaars by night to the palace of 
Ali Riza Pasha, who was acting as military governor 
for the Turks. Ali Riza, although one of the sul- 
tan’s highest officials in Syria, secretly sympathized 
with the Arabian Nationalist movement. 'That eve- 
ning at dinner, over innumerable cups of sweetened 
coffee, Ali Riza informed Lawrence that the grow- 
ing dissension between Turkish and German officials 
would assure the ultimate success of the Allies in 
Palestine and Arabia. ‘The Germans had become so 





THROUGH THE TURKISH LINES 249 


high and mighty in their own estimation that they 
were treating the Turks like dogs. Consequently, 
feeling against the Germans had become so bitter 
that whenever the German General Staff gave an 
order the Turks would do their best to prevent its 
execution. According to Ali Riza, Falkenhayn a 
few weeks previously had advised the Turks to aban- 
don both Palestine and Arabia and retire to a line 
across Syria to the Mediterranean from Deraa, the 
important railway junction south of Damascus. 
The German field-marshal had given the Turks sound 
and valuable advice, but the latter were as reluctant 
to accept it as they were to accept Field-Marshal 
Falkenhayn himself as their commander-in-chief. 
As a result of their having spurned his counsel they 
were so overwhelmed a little later by the combined 
British and Arabian forces that they not only lost 
all the region which Falkenhayn had advised them 
to abandon but they also lost the city of Damascus 
and the entire territory of Syria, which they other- 
wise might have saved. 

After a bountiful dinner and this illuminating in- 
terview with the Ottoman governor of Damascus, 
Lawrence and Dahmi slipped into the desert and 
made their way south into the Hauran, the country 
of the Druses, a people who pitch their tents around 
a high mountain called Jebel Druz. The Druses 
owe much of their tribal solidarity to their peculiar 
religion, which is a secret faith built up around the 
worship of Hakim, a mad sultan of Egypt of the 


250 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Middle Ages. ‘The Turks have always had great 
difficulty in getting this quarrelsome independent 
tribe to recognize Ottoman authority or pay taxes 
to the sultan. Most of the desert Arabs have car- 
ried on perpetual blood-feuds with them, but Law- 
rence called their chieftains together and, with his 
inimitable gift for winning friends, succeeded in con- 
vincing them that they should swear allegiance to 
Feisal and hold themselves ready to codperate with 
his army when it approached Damascus. 

There would have been no quarter for Lawrence 
had he made a single false step. With his compan- 
ion Dahmi, and Tallal, a Bedouin sheik known to 
the far corners of Arabia, he rode all around Damas- 
cus, Deraa, and the Hauran, making a reconnais- 
sance of the Turkish lines of defense. He explored 
the Turkish railway on three sides of the junction 
at Deraa and took a mental note of important points 
on the lines north, south, and west of the junction 
which it would be necessary for him to cut when he 
made his ultimate advance against Damascus. All 
this was walking right into danger, and only the per- 
‘ection of his disguise and his command of the dia- 
lects of the country saved him from being suspected 
by the Turks and shot as an ordinary spy. He had 
one extremely narrow escape. When strolling non- 
chalantly along the streets of Deraa, dressed as 
Sheik Tallal’s son, two soldiers of the sultan’s army 
stopped him at a bazaar and arrested him on the 
charge of being a deserter from the Turkish army. 


Vas dau GHL AO WOVSSVd AHL GHLYNINYHL GWAVH OL IVS GHV I4VHSI AO SLSOH AHL GAYAHM 








SVUVL AO NIHGIGUVH-TH TVTIVL 





THROUGH THE TURKISH LINES 251 


Every able-bodied Arab in the Ottoman Empire was 
supposed to be under arms. ‘They took him to head- 
quarters and flogged him until he fainted. Then 
they threw him out more dead than alive and fear- 
fully bruised. Sometime later he regained conscious- 
ness, and, barely able to crawl, he made his escape 
under cover of night. 

Masquerading as a woman also entailed many dif- 
ficulties. At Amman, in the hills of Moab, east of 
the Jordan, Lawrence went through the Turkish 
lines disguised as a Bedouin Gipsy. He spent the 
afternoon prowling about the defenses surrounding 
the railway station, and, after deciding that it would 
be futile for his Arabs to attempt to capture it on 
account of the size of the garrison and the strength 
of the artillery, he started toward the desert. A 
party of Turkish soldiers, who had been looking with 
favorable eyes at the Bedouin “woman,” started in 
hot pursuit. For more than a mile they followed 
Lawrence, trying to flirt with him and jeering at him 
when he repulsed their advances. 

One of the most important Turkish strongholds 
on the border of the Arabian Desert was the town 
of Kerak, near the south end of the Dead Sea. One 
night Lawrence, disguised as a Bedouin, went 
through the Turkish lines with Sheik Trad Ibn 
Nueiris of the Beni Sakr tribe and found that there 
happened to be only three hundred Turks in the gar- 
rison at the moment. JLawrence and the sheik ban- 
queted that evening with one of Trad’s Kerak 


252 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


friends. In honor of their distinguished visitors 
the Arab villagers dragged sheep and goats into the 
streets, built large fires, and feasted and circled in 
wild war-dance until the witching hour. The mem- 
bers of the Turkish garrison were so frightened by 
this bold demonstration that they locked themselves 
in their barracks! After the celebration, Lawrence 
and his companion left Kerak and returned to Akaba. 
The result of this unimportant little episode was 
that two thousand more Turkish troops were with- 
drawn from the forces opposing Allenby in Palestine 
and sent down to Kerak. JLawrence had attained 
the two objects that he had in mind in making this 
extended and adventurous tour of enemy territory: 
he had spread broadcast propaganda for the cause of 
Arabian nationalism among the tribes that were still 
under Turkish jurisdiction, and he had obtained in- 
formation enough to fill a book regarding the plans 
of the German High Command. He went over the 
territory behind the Turkish lines so thoroughly that 
during the final drive of the campaign he knew that 
part of the country almost as intimately as the Turks 
themselves, 





CHAPTER XXII 


THE GREATEST HOAX SINCE THE TROJAN HORSE 


' Y ITH the capture of the ancient seaport 
of Akaba, which transformed the She- 
reefian revolt into an invasion of Syria, 

and with the official recognition of the Hedjaz army 

as the right wing of Allenby’s forces, it became im- 

perative that all Lawrence’s movements should fit 

in with Allenby’s plans. 

Allenby by this time was in possession of all south- 
ern Palestine up to a zigzag line extending across 
the country from the Jordan Valley to the shores 
of the Mediterranean just south of Mount Carmel, 
the peak which since earliest times has been known 
as the Mountain of God. His first drive in the au- 
tumn of 1917 had resulted in the liberation of Beer- 
sheba, the ancient home of Abraham and Lot, of 
Gaza, the capital of the Philistines where Samson 
was betrayed: by Delilah, and of Hebron, where 
Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, and Rebecca were buried 
in the cave of Machpelah. It had also resulted in 
the deliverance of Jaffa, the chief port of Palestine 
since the days of David and Solomon three thousand 
years ago, of the Plains of Philistia and the Plains 


of Sharon, and, more important still, had resulted in 
253 


254 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


the liberation of the sacred cities of Bethlehem and 
Jerusalem from the Ottoman yoke. But the ancient 
land of Samaria, the city of Nazareth and all Galilee, 
the coastal plain of northern Palestine and all of 
Syria still remained in the hands of the Turks, so 
that the campaign was only half completed. ‘There 
were now two courses open to Allenby, either to push 
the Turks north by degrees, or to crush Turkish 
power in the East with one sweeping blow. The 
commander-in-chief elected to take the big risk, and 
he chose the latter. 

He decided to launch his final attack north of Jaffa 
and Jerusalem in July, 1918; but in June, when 
Ludendorff was making his last drive toward Paris 
and the Channel Ports, the Allies were so hard 
pressed in Western Europe that they were compelled 
to call upon Allenby to send many of his divisions to 
reinforce them in France. 

This completely disrupted all Allenby’s plans. It 
now became necessary for him to create a new army. 
The unexpected necessity for a complete reconstruc- 
tion of the forces in the Holy Land was a staggering 
blow, but England’s modern Coeur de Lion was not 
in the least disheartened and immediately set to work 
to form a new army made up largely of Indian 
divisions from Mesopotamia hitherto untried in the 
war, and from his veteran Anzac cavalry under Light 
Horse Harry Chauvel, the Australian general whom 
he had placed in command of the largest body of 
mounted troops that ever participated in modern 





THE GREATEST HOAX 255 


warfare. Instead of attacking the Turks in northern 
Palestine in June or July, it now seemed impossible 
for him to launch his final thunderbolt before October 
or November. Lawrence was convinced that such 
a long delay would make it difficult for him to give 
much assistance on the right flank. By then his res- 
tive Bedouins would be wanting to migrate with their 
flocks to their winter pastures on the Central Arabian 
plateaus, and, in addition, his many years’ experience 
in the country led him to believe that autumn rains 
would impede any military operation attempted dur- 
ing that season. 

He explained this to the commander-in-chief, who 
immediately grasped the situation and by super- 
human effort whipped his new army into shape so 
that his new divisions were ready to take the field 
within eight weeks from the date of their arrival from 
Mesopotamia! Toward the end of August he 
despatched an aéroplane to Arabia with a welcome 
message for Lawrence, the announcement that he 
would be ready for a joint attack early in September 
instead of October or November. 

Allenby, fully aware of the inexperience of most 
of his new troops, realized that the Turks would have 
to be defeated by strategy rather than by force. So 
he decided to dupe the Turks with a colossal hoax, a 
sort of moving picture of the British Army pushing 
straight up along the Jordan River from the Dead 
Sea toward Galilee. But it was to be a bogus army! 
In preparing this hoax Allenby’s first move was to 


256 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


shift all his camel-hospitals from southern Palestine 
to the Jordan Valley within fifteen miles of the 
Turkish lines. Next, he had hundreds of condemned 
and worn-out tents shipped up over the Milk and 
Honey Railway from Kgypt, and pitched them on 
the banks of the Jordan. Then he hauled all his 
captured Turkish cannons down into the Jordan Val- 
ley and started them blazing away in the direction of 
the Turks encamped in the hills of Moab. Ten thou- 
sand. horse-blankets were thrown over bushes in the 
valley and tied up to look like horse-lines. Five new 
pontoon-bridges were flung over the river. 

The sacred valley of the Jordan was filled with all 
the properties for a sham battle of the ages. Never 
since the Greeks captured Troy with their famous 
wooden horse has such a remarkable bit of camouflage 
been put over on a credulous enemy. 

When the German reconnaissance aéroplanes flew 
over the Jordan they buzzed back to Turkish head- 
quarters with the important news that Allenby had 
placed two new divisions in this sector! ‘This camou- 
flage army, arranged largely by General Bartholo- 
mew of Allenby’s staff, was so realistic that the Ger- 
mans and Turks never dreamed that it might all be a 
fake; and fortunately the lines were so carefully 
guarded that not a single German or Turkish spy got 
through. Lawrence, also, lent a helping hand in dup- 
ing the Turks. Shortly before the date arranged for 
the big push three hundred members of the Imperial 
Camel Corps came down from Palestine to help him. 





pap Ness 


THE GREATEST HOAX 257 


They were under the command of Colonel “Robin” 
Buxton, a born soldier, who before the war was a 
prominent Lombard Street banker. Under the 
guidance of his tent-mate, Major W. E. Marshall, 
R.A.M.C., “the fighting bacteriologist,’” Lawrence 
sent the camel corps to attack an important Turkish 
garrison at Mudawara, where a spectacular twenty- 
minute battle was fought on August 8. 

After the battle of Mudawara, Lawrence led a 
combined force of camel corps and Arabs against 
Amman, just east of the Jordan. This was merely 
a feint, but it confirmed the Turks in the belief that 
the valley of the historic Jordan River was swarming 
with the bulk of Allenby’s forces. Lawrence sent 
one of the most prominent chiefs of the Beni Sakr 
toward Damascus with £7000 in gold to buy barley. 
The sheik bought recklessly in every town and village 
on the eastern border of Syria. The Turks, knowing 
well that Emir Feisal’s Bedouin cavalry could not 
use such vast quantities of grain, immediately decided 
that the barley must be intended for Allenby’s forces 
in the Jordan Valley. Lawrence also started the 
rumor through the Arab army that Emir Feisal’s 
host intended to launch its main attack against Deraa 
railway junction between Amman and Damascus. 

*“As a matter of fact,’ Lawrence remarked, “we 
had every intention of attacking Deraa, but we 
spread the news so far and wide that the Turks re- 
fused to believe it. ‘Then in deadly secrecy we con- 
fided to a chosen few in the inner circle that we really 


258 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


were going to concentrate all of our forces against 
Amman. But we were not.” 

This “‘secret,” of course, leaked out and was be- 
trayed to the Turks, who immediately shifted the 
greater part of their forces to the vicinity of Amman, 
exactly as Allenby and Lawrence had planned. 

When the advance of the Arab army actually 
started, none but Emir Feisal, Colonel Joyce, and 
Colonel Lawrence knew that the attack was to center 
on Deraa. Early in September Lawrence started 
north from the head of the Gulf of Akaba to help 
Allenby in his historic final drive. But instead of 
takiag his Bedouin followers from the Hedjaz, with 
the exception of his personal body-guard Lawrence 
recruited a new army from the tribes of the North 
Arabian Desert, and Joyce kept adding to his 
rapidly increasing mob of deserters from the Turkish 
ranks. When it started up the Wadi Araba from 
the head of the Gulf of Akaba, Lawrence’s caravan 
consisted of two thousand baggage-camels, four 
hundred and fifty Arab regulars mounted on racing- 
camels, four Arab machine-gun units, two aéroplanes, 
three Rolls-Royce armored cars, a demolition com- 
pany of picked men from the Egyptian camel corps, 
a battalion of Gurkhas from India mounted on tall 
camels from the Sind Desert, and four mountain- 
guns manned by French Algerians. In addition he 
had his resplendent private body-guard of one hun- 
dred picked Bedouins. His total force amounted to 
one thousand men mounted on camels. Lawrence’s 


THE GREATEST HOAX 259 


motto on this expedition, as on all others, was, ““No 
margin!” He faced a march of five hundred miles 
across unmapped desert under stupendous transport 
difficulties. During one stage they marched four 
days from one water-hole to another, carrying their 
entire water-supply with them and suffering from 
thirst. When they reached the new water-hole they 
drank copiously, only to discover that the water was 
filled with leeches. These leeches fastened themselves 
on the inside of their nasal membranes and proved 
most painful. But the column made the trek in a 
fortnight. They were hurrying north to cut three 
Turkish railway lines and all the telegraph-wires 
around Deraa, Lawrence’s primary mission being to 
prevent the Turks from communicating with Damas- 
cus, Aleppo, and Constantinople when Allenby 
started his advance. 

The camouflage army of the Jordan was a complete 
success. As a matter of fact, there were only three 
battalions of able-bodied troops in that part of the 
Holy Land, two of which were made up of newly 
arrived Jewish troops from the British Isles and the 
United States. 

If the Turks had known the truth they might have 
sent down one brigade, pushed up behind Allenby’s 
lines, and recaptured Jerusalem! 

Allenby was taking enormous chances, but great 
men usually do. 

The commander-in-chief supplied his troops in the 
Jordan Valley with but three weeks’ rations in order 


260 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


that they might use all of the transport for his main 
army. His supply people were frantic; they said 
the troops along the Jordan must be given eight 
weeks’ food; but Allenby knew he was perfectly safe 
so long as his plan for one smash went through with- 
out a hitch. 

Allenby felt that it would not be safe to engage 
the Turks in a decisive pitched battle with a brand 
new army. He had not had time to complete his work 
of reorganization. So his sole object was to hoodwink 
the Turks by luring them to the wrong place, the 
Jordan Valley, thus leaving a vulnerable stretch over 
near the Mediterranean. 

Allenby’s sham attack down near Jericho had beer 
scheduled for September 18. The British Intel- 
ligence Corps carefully allowed this “secret” to get 
out, and of course the Turks were ready to meet it. 
Allenby’s real attack was made not on the eighteenth 
but on the nineteenth, and when they woke up and 
discovered how they had been fooled, the war in the 
Near East was over, and most of them were British 
or Arab prisoners. Furthermore, it was not made in 
the Jordan Valley but away on the other side of 
Palestine to the north of Jaffa on the Mediterranean 
coast! He had transferred nearly all his infantry 
and cavalry there by night, and they remained con- 
cealed in the orange-groves until the day of the real 
battle, the battle that broke the backbone of the 
Ottoman Empire. 








CHAPTER XXIII 


A CAVALRY NAVAL ENGAGEMENT AND LAWRENCES 
LAST GREAT RAID 


LL the Turkish ammunition and food had 
A to be brought down from northern Syria 

over the Damascus-Palestine-Amman-Me- 
dina Railway. Lawrence’s plan was to swing way 
out across the unmapped sea of sand, get clear around 
the eastern end of the Turkish lines, unexpectedly 
appear out of the desert, dash up behind the Turks, 
and. cut all their communication round Deraa. One 
of Lawrence’s most difficult problems during this 
manoeuver was to keep his column supplied. Even 
his armored cars and aéroplanes could not carry 
enough petrol to pull through. From Akaba to the 
oasis of Azarak is 290 miles across burning desert. 
There were wells at only three places where the 
camels could be watered, and the little band had to 
live from hand to mouth. 

On its way the column rested at Tafileh, a village 
of six thousand inhabitants, near which the most un- 
usual episode of the whole campaign had taken place. 
A body of Bedouin horse under Abu Irgeig of Beer- 
sheba, under cover of darkness, rode up to a small 


enemy naval base near the southern end of the Dead 
261 


262 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Sea, not far from the ancient cities of Sodom and 
Gomorrah. The so-called Turkish Dead Sea Fleet, 
consisting of a few ancient arks and motor-driven 
craft armed with light guns, was moored alongshore. 
The officers were having breakfast in a Turkish Army 
mess near-by, utterly unaware of the approach of a 
hostile force. Abu Irgeig saw at a glance that the 
decks were deserted except for a few sentries. So he 
ordered his followers to dismount. With a rush they 
clambered on board like Barbary corsairs, scuppered 
the crews, scuttled the boats, remounted their snort: 
ing thoroughbreds, and vanished into the desert haze 
before the dazed Turks had time to realize what had 
happened. ‘This is perhaps the only occasion in his- 
tory in which a naval engagement has been won by 
cavalry. 

Lawrence’s original plan was to gather under his 
standard the enormous Rualla tribe, which fills a 
large part of the North Arabian Desert, and then 
descend in force upon the Hauran hill country to 
make a direct assault on Deraa. This came to 
naught because of a little difference which unexpect- 
edly arose between King Hussein and General Jaffer 
Pasha and the senior officers of the northern army, 
which ruffled the temper of an important part of 
Lawrence’s forces. By the time harmony had been 
restored it was too late, and, as a result, the Rualla 
never came together, making it necessary for Law- 
rence to modify his scheme. In the end he decided 
to carry out a flying attack on the railways north, 


A CAVALRY ENGAGEMENT 263 


west, and south of Deraa with his regular troops, 
assisted only by the wild Druses of the Hauran and 
a handful of the Rualla horse under Sheiks Khalid 
and Trad Shaalan. Before starting this attack, 
Lawrence arranged for another feint to be made on 
the eighteenth against Amman and Ks Salt, and for 
this purpose he sent word to the members of the Beni 
Sakr tribe to mass in the desert near Amman. The 
rumor of this, confirmed by Allenby’s mobilization 
of his great camouflage army in the Jordan Valley, 
kept the eyes of the Turks fixed constantly on the 
Jordan instead of on the Mediterranean coasta} 
region to the north of Jaffa. 

On the oasis of Azarak is a magnificent old castle 
that dates from somewhere between the sixth and 
fourteenth centuries, and is turreted and loopholed 
like the fortress of a Scottish baron. Evidently it 
was an outpost of the far-flung Roman Empire, for 
Colonel R. V. Buxton, of the Imperial Camel Corps, 
found a carved stone in the ruins on which there was 
an inscription stating that two legions of Antoninus 
Pius had been stationed here. So far as is known no 
other force visited it until Lawrence and his men 
came. The Arabs refuse to go near it because they 
say it is haunted by the mad hunting-dogs of the 
Shepherd Kings that prowl round it o’ nights. Law- 
rence at one time thought he would like to retire here 
and make Azarak Castle his home after the war. 
On the thirteenth, Lawrence, accompanied by the 
small but mobile force which he had organized for 


264 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


his big attack on Deraa, left the oasis of Azark and 
marched into the Es Salt foot-hills. Two days later 
they arrived at Umtaiye, thirteen miles southeast of 
Deraa, where the male population of nearly all the 
villages of the Hauran joined the Shereefian army 
ina body. Among them was Sheik Tallal el Hareid- 
hin of Tafas, the finest fighter in the Hauran, who 
had accompanied Lawrence on some of his spying 
expeditions behind the Turkish lines. He acted as 
guide for the expedition from this point and spon- 
sored Lawrence’s cause in every village. Lawrence 
declared that if it had not been for this man’s courage, 
energy, and honesty some of the tribes of the country 
through which they passed, who were blood-enemies 
of King Hussein and Emir Feisal, might easily have 
wrecked all their plans. Probably twenty or thirty 
thousand Arab villagers and nomads joined Law- 
rence at different points in this grand finale of the 
Near Eastern campaign. 3 

In addition to severing the lines of communication 
it was Lawrence’s intention to place himself and his 
troops between the vital railway junction at Deraa 
and the Turkish armies in Palestine so as to lure the 
enemy into reinforcing the thus isolated garrison at 
Deraa with troops from the Palestine front who other- 
wise would be free to help stem Allenby’s advance. 
At the same moment it was also necessary for Law- 
rence to cut the railway to the south and west of 
Deraa in order to add color to the belief of the enemy 
that the entire Allied attack was coming against the 





A CAVALRY ENGAGEMENT 265 


Turkish Fourth Army in the upper Jordan Valley. 
The only unit available for putting the railway out 
of business consisted of the armored cars. The cars, 
plus Lawrence, whizzed gloriously down the railway 
line and captured one post before the open-mouthed 
Turks were aware of their danger. This post com- 
manded an attractive railway bridge, 149 kilos south 
of Damascus, on which was inscribed a flattering 
dedication of the bridge to old Abdul Hamid, the 
Red Sultan. Lawrence planted tulips containing 
150 pounds of guncotton at both ends and in the cen- 
ter, and when he touched them off the bridge faded 
away on the autumn breeze. This job completed, 
the cars started on again at top speed but became 
stranded in the sand, where they were delayed for 
several hours. On their way back to rejoin the army 
in the Hauran they crossed the railway five miles 
north of Deraa, where Lawrence suppressed another 
post, wiped out a Kurdish cavalry detachment, blew 
up another bridge, and ripped up six hundred pairs 
of rails. 

After blowing up enough of the railway in the 
vicinity of Deraa to throw the whole Turkish service 
of supply into complete chaos, Lawrence and his men 
ascended a high promontory called Mount Tell Ara, 
which commanded a panoramic view of Deraa four 
miles away. ‘Through his field-glasses he made out 
nine planes on the enemy’s aérodrome. During that 
morning the German aviators had had it all their own 
way in the air. They had been playing mischief 


266 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


with Lawrence’s troops by dropping their eggs and 
raking the Arabs with their machine-guns. The 
Shereefian forces tried to defend themselves from the 
ground with their light artillery, but they were get- 
ing the worst of it until Lawrence’s one surviving 
machine, an antiquated old bus piloted by Captain 
Junor, came trundling up from Azark and sailed 
square into the middle of the whole German squad- 
ron, Lawrence and his followers watched this fracas 
with mixed feelings, for each of the four enemy two- 
seaters and four scout-planes was more than the equal 
of the one prehistoric British machine. With both 
skill and good luck Captain Junor cruised right 
through the German birdmen and led the whole circus 
off to the westward. ‘Twenty minutes later the 
plucky Junor came tearing back through the air with 
his attendant swarm of enemy planes and signaled 
down to Lawrence that he had run out of petrol. He 
landed within fifty yards of the Arab column, and his 
B.E. flopped over on its back. A German Hal- 
berstadt dived on it at once and scored a direct hit 
with a bomb that blew the little British machine into 
bits. Fortunately, Junor had jumped out of his 
seat a moment before. The only part of his B.E. 
that was not destroyed was the Lewis machine-gun. 
Within half an hour the plucky pilot had transferred 
it to a Ford truck and was tearing around outside 
Deraa, raking the Turks with his tracer bullets. 
Meanwhile, Lawrence dashed off to join the de- 
tachment of troops he had sent on in the direction of 





A CAVALRY ENGAGEMENT — 267 


Mezerib. An hour after reaching it he helped them 
cut the main Turkish telegraph-lines between Pales- 
tine and Syria. It would be difficult to overestimate 
the importance of this, because it completely cut the 
Turkish armies off from all hope of relief from 
Northern Syria and Turkey proper. 

At Mezerib several thousand more natives of the 
Hauran joined the Arab forces, and the following 
day Lawrence and his column marched on along the 
railway toward Palestine, right into the heart of the 
Turkish back area. They spent most of that day 
planting tulips, and near Nasib Lawrence blew up 
his seventy-ninth bridge, a rather large one with three 
fine arches, thus bringing to a close his long and 
successful career of demolition. Knowing it might 
be his last, he planted twice as many tulips under it 
as necessary. 

The column slept soundly at Nasib on the night 
of the eighteenth after a good day’s work. ‘The next 
morning, bright and early, Lawrence marched his 
camels, horses, and Arabs off to Umtaiye, where he 
was joined by the armored cars. During the morn- 
ing another enemy aérodrome was sighted near the 
railway, and Lawrence, with two of the armored cars, 
sped across open country for a near view. They 
found three German two-seaters in front of the 
hangars. Had it not been for a deep gully inter- 
vening, the two armored cars would have rushed 
them. As it was, two of the Germans took off and 
circled around like great birds, pouring streams of 


268 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


lead down on the Rolls-Royce machines, while at the 
same time Lawrence and the crews inside the turrets 
finished the third aéroplane with fifteen hundred 
bullets. As the armored cars started back to Um- 
taiye, the Germans swooped down on them four 


times; but all their bombs were badly placed, and the 


cars escaped unhurt, except for a bit of shrapnel that 
wounded the colonel in the hand. Speaking of his 
impression of armored car work, Lawrence remarked 
that he considered it fighting de luxe. 

This same day the Arab regulars, under Jaffer 
Pasha, and the armored cars and French detachment 
and the Rualla horse under Nuri Shallan, gave a fine 
account of themselves. 

Jaffer Pasha, who also slashed his way brilliantly 
through this engagement, comes of a rich and noble 
Bagdad family. His history is full of romantic 
vicissitudes. At the outbreak of the war, Jaffar el 
Askari, as a general on the Turkish staff, was sent 
across in a submarine from Constantinople to North 
Africa to organize an uprising .in the Sahara among 
the Senussi Arabs. He led the Senussi in their short 
but spectacular campaign against the British. In 
the first battle he defeated the British; the second 
battle was a draw; and in the third he was badly 
wounded, defeated, and captured by the Dorset Yeo- 
manry at Agagia, near Sollum, and imprisoned in 
the great citadel at Cairo. In trying to escape at the 
end of three months he broke his ankle and was re- 
captured in the moat under the citadel. He was as 


a 





A CAVALRY ENGAGEMENT 269 


fat as a barrel, full of the joy of life, and such a 
gentlemanly, likable fellow that a little later the 
British put him on parole and allowed him to wander 
about Cairo. Being an Arab himself, he sym- 
pathized with the Arab Nationalist cause and one 
day asked his British captors to permit him to volun- 
teer as a private with Feisal. His request was 
granted, and he did such remarkable work that be- 
fore many months had passed he had risen to the post 
of commander-in-chief of Feisal’s regular army, which 
was composed mainly of deserters from the Turkish 
ranks who had known Jaffer as a general in Turkey. 
Jaffer Pasha had received the kaiser’s Iron Cross at 
the Dardanelles and the Turkish Crescent for his 
work in the Senussi campaign, and after he had been 
with the Arabs for a while he was made a commander 
of the Order of St. Michael and St. George by the 
British! Allenby accorded him this last honor at his 
Ramleh headquarters in Palestine. The guard of 
honor on this occasion was the same Dorset Yeomanry 
that had captured the pasha just a year before. 
Jaffer was tremendously pleased and amused at this 
subtle touch of humor on Allenby’s part. 

Nuri Said, Jaffer Pasha’s brother-in-law, played 
an equally brilliant part in the war. He was Emir 
Feisal’s chief of staff and remained in this position 
when Feisal became king in Damascus and later in 
Bagdad. Like Jaffer he had attended the Turkish 
Staff College. Inthe Balkan War he was an aviator. 
Afterward he acted as secretary of the Arab officers’ 


270 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


secret society which plotted to overthrow the Turks. 
He is reckless and loves a hot fight. In fact, the 
hotter the action the cooler was Nuri Said. He was 
one of the few Arab townsmen whom the Bedouins 
admired and respected. 

All had gone well with the preliminary plans for 
Allenby’s drive in Palestine. But until twenty-four 
hours before the attack was launched, on the nine- 
teenth, the commander-in-chief himself was not cer- 
tain whether he was going to succeed or not. If the 
Turks and Germans had discovered his real plan and 
had not been deceived into thinking that both the 
British and Arabian forces were concentrating on 
Amman with the intention of attempting to push 
north up the Jordan Valley and if the enemy had 
withdrawn its right wing only about half-way across 
Palestine from the Mediterranean coast and the River 
Auja to the hills of Samaria, which would merely 
have been a retirement of ten miles along the entire 
front, the Turks could have played safe, Allenby’s 
whole blow would have been wasted, and Lawrence's 
brilliant operations around Deraa would have been 
all in vain. Lawrence did not even have sufficient 
supplies to last his column for two extra days, so that 
failure would have been nothing short of a catastrophe 
for him. Of course, neither Allenby nor Lawrence 
would have suffered heavy losses, but on the other 
hand they would not have rung the curtain down in 
Arabia and Palestine so soon. The entire World 
War might have dragged on for several months 





A CAVALRY ENGAGEMENT 271 


longer, and an additional hundred thousand lives or 
more might have been sacrificed on the Western 
Front. But there were no ifs; the enemy walked 
into the prepared trap like lambs to the slaughter. 


CHAPTER XXIV 


THE DOWNFALL OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 


N the whole, this last joint operation of the 
() British and Arabian forces was one of the 

most marvelous pieces of staff planning in | 
all military annals. It was a game of chess played 
by experts on an international board. Never be- 
fore was there a similar campaign. It was a com- 
plete reversal of all Marshal Foch’s principles. Al- 
lenby and Lawrence went back to the Napoleonic 
wars, to the battles of the eighteenth century, when 
generals won by manceuver and strategy instead of 
by tactics (the term “tactics” referring to the science 
of handling men under fire). In this, the most bril- 
liant and spectacular military operation in the world’s 
history, Allenby and Lawrence lost only four hun- 
dred and fifty men, although they completely anni- 
hilated the Turkish army, captured over one hun- 
dred thousand Turks, advanced more than three 
hundred miles in less than a month, and broke the 
backbone of the Turkish Empire. Part of the credit 
should go to Brigadier-General Bartholomew. AI- 
lenby is colossal; he needs a needle-sharp man to 
complete him. He had such an officer and strategist 


in General Bartholomew. 
272 





DOWNFALL OF THE EMPIRE 278 


Allenby’s complete plan, which involved the de- 
struction of all the Turkish effectives with one sweep- 
ing blow, was known only to four people; the 
commander-in-chief himself, his chief of Staff, 
(Major-General Boles), General Bartholomew, and 
Colonel Lawrence. Not even Emir Feisal or King 
Hussein knew what was going to happen. 

At five o'clock on the morning of September 18, 
1917, General Bartholomew came to his office at 
headquarters in Ramleh and anxiously said to the 
staff officer on duty: “Has there been any change?” 

“No, the Turks are still there,” replied the latter. 

“Good!” said Bartholomew. “We will take at 
least thirty thousand prisoners before this show is 
over.” He did not dream that the Allied forces 
would capture three times thirty thousand Turks. 

The deception of the enemy had been perfect in 
every detail. When Allenby’s forces entered Naz- 
areth, which had been the German and Turkish 
Palestine headquarters, they found papers indicating 
that the German High Command had been certain 
the attack would take place in the Jordan Valley. 
Field-Marshal von Sanders had been taken in down 
to the last point. 

Meanwhile Lawrence, Joyce, General Nuri, and 
their associates had received no news of what was 
going on in Palestine, but they were busy day and 
night demolishing sections of the railway. One 
night Lord Winterton, who played an active part in 
this final stage of the desert campaign, went out on a 


274 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


demolition expedition and placed some thirty parties 
at work along the line. The earl himself dashed 
about in the dark from point to point in an armored 
car. While walking along the railway he met a sol- 
dier who said, “How are things?” 

“Fine!” replied Winterton; “we have twenty-eight 
charges planted and will be ready to touch them off 
in a few minutes.” The soldier remarked that this 
was splendid, and then disappeared. A moment 
later machine-guns blazed forth on all sides, and the 
earl had to run for it. His questioner had either 
been a German or a Turk, and had the incident oc- 
curred an hour earlier it might have spoiled Lord 
Winterton’s work for that night. But the tulips 
were duly touched off, and the show was a success. 

The followmg day Lawrence dashed back to 
Azarak in an armored car, then flew across the desert 
and northern Palestine to Allenby’s headquarters at 
Ramleh. A hurried conference with the commander- 
in-chief secured for him three more Bristol fighters, 
the best battle-planes that the British were using 
in the Holy Land. He also brought back the as- 


tounding news that more than twenty thousand — 


prisoners had already been taken by Allenby’s forces, 
that Nazareth, Nablus, and many other important 
centers had fallen, and that they were advancing to- 
ward Deraa and Damascus. That meant that the 
Arabian army would be called upon by Allenby to 
play a still greater part from now on, because it was 
the only force between the crumbling Turkish divi- 


DOWNFALL OF THE EMPIRE 275 


sions and Anatolia, toward which they must retreat. 

Lawrence had flown to Palestine for aéroplanes 
because the Germans had nine of them near Deraa 
with which they were bombing Feisal’s followers 
out of the ground. One of the pilots was a Captain 
Peters, and another was a Captain Ross Smith, who 
later became world famous and was knighted for 
flying from England to Australia. Lord Winterton 
gives us a graphic picture of the events of that morn- 
ing in a scintillating article in “Blackwood’s”’: 


While L. and the airmen were having breakfast with us, 
a Turkish ’plane was observed, making straight for us. One 
of the airmen... hurried off to down the intruder. 
This he successfully did, and the Turkish ’plane fell in 
flames near the railway. He then returned and finished his 
porridge, which had been kept hot for him meanwhile! But 
not for him a peaceful breakfast that morning. He had 
barely reached the marmalade stage when another Turkish 
*plane appeared. Up hurried the Australian again; but 
this Turk was too wily and scuttled back te Deraa, only 
to be chased by P. on another machine, which sent him down 
in flames. 


That night the Germans burnt all of their remain- 
ing machines, and from that moment the British air- 
men had the air above North Arabia, Palestine, and 
Syria to themselves. 

That afternoon a giant Handley-Page arrived 
from Palestine with General Borton, commander 
of Allenby’s air squadrons, as the passenger and 
Ross Smith as the pilot. They brought forty- 


276 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


seven tins of petrol and also a supply of tea 
for Lawrence, Winterton, and companions. ‘This 
was the first time that a great night-bombing plane 
ever flew over the enemy lines by day. ‘The purpose 
was for propaganda, and so profoundly were the 
tribesmen impressed by this vast bird, which was 
several times larger than any they had thus far seen, 
that all of the peoples of the Hauran, who had been 
reluctant to codperate with Emir Feisal, immediately 
swore allegiance to the Arab cause and galloped in 
on their horses, with their rifles popping off into the 
air, eager to charge the Turks, or at least make a 
noisy display of valor. 

The next day the infantry under General Jaffer 
Pasha, the jovial commander-in-chief of Colonel 
Joyce’s regulars, went down to have a look at the first 
large bridge which Lawrence had dynamited in the 
vicinity of Deraa. They found it nearly repaired, 
but after a sharp fight they drove off its guards, who 
were persistent and game German machine-gunners, 
destroyed more of the line, and then proceeded to 
burn the great timber framework which had been 
erected by the Turks and Germans during the inter- 
vening seven days. In this rather sharp encounter 
the armored cars, the French detachment under 
Captain Pisani, and the Rualla Horse under Nuri 
Shaalan plunged into the heart of things. Nuri is 
a quiet retiring man of few words and plenty of deeds. 
He turned out to be unusually intelligent, well in- 
formed, decisive, and full of quiet humor. Lawrence 





DOWNFALL OF THE EMPIRE 277 


once remarked to me that he not only was the chief 
of the largest tribe in all the desert but one of the 
finest Arab sheiks he had ever met, and that the mem- 
bers of his tribe were like wax in his hands because 
“he knows what should be done and does it.” 

When Lawrence started his operations around 
Deraa, von Sanders did exactly what his opponents 
wanted him to do. He sent his last reserves up to 
Deraa, so that when Allenby’s troops once smashed 
through the Turkish front lines they had fairly clear 
going ahead of them. At the important railway 
junction of Afuleh, on the evening of the nineteenth, 
the Turkish motor-lorries came streaming in for sup- 
plies, not knowing that all their great depots were 
in the hands of Allenby’s men. As they rumbled 
into the supply-station, a British officer remarked 
politely to one and all, ““Would you mind going this 
way, please?’ ‘That lasted for four hours, until the 
news spread through the Turkish back area that 
Allenby’s troops had taken Afuleh, the railway junc- 
tion in the center of the plain of Esdraelon, where 
the Turkish railway which connects Constantinople, 
Damascus, and the Holy Land branches out, one 
line extending down into Samaria and the other east 
to Haifa on the Mediterranean. Afuleh was the main 
supply-base of the whole Turkish army. After 
Allenby had occupied Afuleh for fully six hours, a 
German plane came down with orders to von Sanders 
from Hindenburg. The occupants of the plane did 
not discover their predicament until they left their 


278 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


machine and walked over to local headquarters to re- 
port. To their chagrin they found themselves turn- 
ing over their orders to Allenby’s staff. 

By September 24 Allenby’s forces had advanced 
so far that the entire Turkish Fourth Army, con- 
centrated around Amman and the Jordan on the 
mission of attacking empty tents and horse-blankets, 
had been ordered back to defend Deraa and Damas- 
cus. The Turkish Fourth Army generals were in- 
furiated when they discovered that the railway line 
had been cut behind them, and attempted to retreat 
north along their motor-roads with all their guns and 
transport. Lawrence and his cavalry did not intend 
to pave their retreat with roses. Stationed on the 
hills they poured down such an incessant stream of 
bullets that the Turks were forced to abandon all 
their guns and carts between Mafrak and Nasib. 
Hundreds were slaughtered. The formal column of 
retreat broke up into a confused mass of fugitives, 
who never had a minute’s peace to reform their lines. 
British aéroplanes added the finishing touch by drop- 
ping bombs, and the Turkish Fourth Army scattered 
panic-sticken in all directions. 

Lawrence now decided to put himself between 
Deraa and Damascus, hoping to force the immediate 
evacuation of Deraa and thus pick up the sorry frag- 
ments of the crack Turkish Fourth Army as it 
emerged from Deraa, and also harass other remnants 
of the Turkish armies in Palestine that might at- 
tempt to escape north. Accordingly, at the head 





DOWNFALL OF THE EMPIRE 279 


of his camel corps, he made a hurried forced march 
northward on the twenty-fifth, and by the afternoon 
of the twenty-sixth swept down on the Turkish rail- 
way near Ghazale and Ezra on the road to Damas- 
cus. With him were Nasir, Nuri, Auda, and the 
Druses—“names with which to hush children even 
in the daytime,” to quote Lawrence himself. His 
rapid manoeuvers took the panic-stricken Turks com- 
pletely by surprise. Just the previous day they had 
worked feverishly on the railway line and had re- 
opened it for traffic at the points where Lawrence 
had damaged it a week earlier. He planted a few 
hundred tulips, putting the line out of commission 
permanently and penning six complete trains in 
Deraa. Fantastic reports of disaster spread like 
wildfire throughout Syria, and the Turks at once 
began the evacuation of Deraa by road. 

By dawn of the twenty-seventh, Lawrence and his 
cavalry were already out scouting the surrounding 
country and had captured two Austro-Turk machine- 
gun companies placed across a road to oppose 
Allenby’s approaching columns. Then Lawrence 
climbed to the summit of a high hill in the vicinity 
called Sheik Saad, whence he could sweep the 
country-side with his glasses. Whenever he saw a 
small enemy column appearing on the horizon, he 
jumped on his horse and, accompanied by some nine 
hundred picked men only too eager for that kind of 
diversion, charged into the midst of them as if they 
had been tin soldiers and serenely took them all pris- 


280 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


oners. If from his observation station on the hill he 
saw a column that was too large to tackle, he lay 
low and let it pass. 

About noon an aéroplane dropped Lawrence a 
message stating that two columns of 'Turks were ad- 
vancing on him. One, six thousand strong, was com- 
ing from Deraa; the other, two thousand strong, 
from Mazerib. Lawrence decided that the second 
was about his size. Sending for some of his regulars, 
who were gathering stray Turks like daisies a few 
miles away, he dashed off to intercept the enemy near 
Tafas. At the same time he sent the Hauran horse- 
men in the other direction to get around behind them 
and hang on the skirts of the column in order to annoy 
them. The Turks reached Tafas a short time before 
Lawrence and brutally mistreated all the women and 
children of the village. Shereef Bey, commander of 
the Turkish Lancers, at the rear-guard of the col- 
umn, ordered all the people massacred, including the 
women and children. Tallal, head sheik of this vil- 
lage of Tafas, who had been a great tower of strength 
with Lawrence from the beginning and one of the 
boldest horsemen in North Arabia, was riding at the 
front of the Arab column with Lawrence and Auda 
Abu Tayi when he came upon the wives and children 
of his kinsmen lying in pools of blood in the road. 
Several years after the war one of Lawrence’s poet 
friends in England got married, and when Lawrence 
expressed regret at not having enough money to buy 
an appropriate wedding present the poet suggested 





DOWNFALL OF THE EMPIRE — 281 


that he might let him have a few pages of his diary 
instead. ‘The wish was granted, and the poet dis- 
posed of the pages to “The World’s Work” for pub- 
lication in America. The portion sold happened to 
include Lawrence’s story of the death of the gallant 
Sheik Tallal el Hareidhin: 


We left Abd el Main there and rode on past the other 
bodies, now seen clearly in the sunlight to be men, women 
and four babies, toward the village whose loneliness we 
knew meant that it was full of death and horror. On the 
outskirts were the low mud walls of some sheep-folds, and 
on one lay something red and white. I looked nearer, and 
saw the body of a woman folded across it, face downward, 
nailed there by a saw-bayonet whose haft stuck hideously 
into the air from between her naked legs. She had been 
pregnant, and about her were others, perhaps twenty in 
all, variously killed, but laid out to accord with an obscene 
taste. The Zaagi burst out in wild peals of laughter, in 
which some of those who were not sick joined hysterically. 
It was a sight near madness, the more desolate for the warm 
sunshine and the clean air of this upland afternoon. I 
said: ‘The best of you brings me the most Turkish dead” ; 
and we turned and rode as fast as we might in the direction 
of the fading enemy. On our way we shot down those of 
them fallen out by the roadside who came imploring our 
pity. 

Tallal had seen something of what we had seen. He 
gave one moan like a hurt animal, and then slowly rode 
to the higher ground, and sat there a long while on his mare, 
shivering and looking fixedly after the Turks. I moved 
toward him to speak to him, but Auda caught my rein and 


282 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


stayed me. After some minutes Tallal very slowly drew 
his headcloth about his face, and then seemed to take hold 
of himself, for he dashed his stirrups into his horse’s flanks 
and galloped headlong, bending low in the saddle and sway- 
ing as though he would fall, straight at the main body of the 
enemy. It was a long ride, down the gentle slope and 
across the hollow, and we all sat there like stone while he 
rushed forward, the drumming of his horse’s hoofs sound- 
ing unnaturally loud in our ears. We had stopped shoot- 
ing and the Turks had stopped shooting; both armies 
waited for him. He flew on in this hushed evening, till he 
was only a few lengths from the enemy. Then he sat up in 
the saddle and cried his war-cry “Tallal, Tallal” twice in a 
tremendous voice. Instantly, all their rifles and machine- 
guns crashed out together, and he and his mare, riddled 
through and through with bullets, fell dead among their 
lance points. | 

Auda looked very cold and grim. “God give him mercy! 
We will take his price.” He shook his rein and moved 
slowly forward after the enemy. We called up _ the 
peasantry, now all drunk with fear and blood, and sent them 
from this side and from that against the retreating column. 
Auda led them like the old lion of battle that he is. By a 
skilful turn he drove the enemy into bad ground and split 
their column into three parts. The third part, the small- 
est, was mostly made up of German and Austrian gunners, 
grouped round three motor-cars which presumably carried 
high officers. They fought magnificently and drove off our 
attacks time and again, despite our desperation. The 
Arabs were fighting like devils, the sweat blinding our eyes, 
our throats parched with dust, and the agony of cruelty 
and revenge which was burning in our bodies and twisting 





DOWNFALL OF THE EMPIRE 288 


our hands about so that we could hardly shoot. By my 
orders they were to take no prisoners—for the first time 
in the war. 


This account of the death of Tallal el Hareidhin 
of Tafas, in Lawrence’s own words, shows us what 
marvelous descriptive powers this young soldier- 
scholar has at his command, and gives us a hint of 
the masterpiece that the world should one day receive 
from his pen. ‘ 

Two German machine-gun companies had resisted 
magnificently and escaped, with the Turkish 
commander-in-chief, Djemal Pasha, in his car in their 
midst. ‘The Arabs wiped out the second section com- 
pletely after a bitter hand-to-hand struggle. No 
prisoners were taken, because the Arabs were wild 
with rage over the Tafas massacre. ‘Two hundred 
and fifty German prisoners had been captured dur- 
ing the day, but when the Arabs discovered one 
of Lawrence’s men with a fractured thigh pinned 
to the ground with two German bayonets, they 
acted like enraged bulls. Turning their machine- 
guns on the remaining prisoners they wiped them 
out. 

After the encounter, Nuri Shaalan, at the head 
of the Rualla horse, rode straight into the main street 
of Deraa. There were two or three fights on the way, 
but they took the town in a whirlwind gallop. 'The 
next morning Nuri returned to Lawrence at Tafas 
with five hundred infantry prisoners and the freedom 


284 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


of the town of Deraa. Some of Allenby’s troops 
arrived in Deraa that day also. 

Lawrence and his army spent that night—and a 
very uneasy night it was—on Sheik Saad hill. He 
did not feel certain of victory since there was always 
a risk of his small force being washed away by a 
great wave of the enemy in retreat. All that night 
the Hauran horsemen clung tenaciously to the great 
Turkish column from Deraa, made up of six thou- 
sand men, which Lawrence had not dared engage 
in pitched battle. Instead of sleeping with the regu- 
lar troops at Sheik Saad, Lawrence spent part of 
the night helping the Hauran cavalry, and at dawn 
he rode off to the westward with a handful of men 
until he met the outposts of the fourth cavalry division 
of the British army. After guiding them into Deraa 
and starting them off on their northward march to- 
ward Damascus, Lawrence galloped back full speed 
to the Hauran cavalry. Although the Turkish col- 
umn when it left Deraa was six thousand strong, at 
the end of twenty-four hours only five thousand re- 
mained. One thousand had been picked off by the 
Bedouins. Eighteen hours more and there were 
three thousand; and after a point called Kiswe, where 
Lawrence headed off the remnant of the Turkish 
Fourth Army and flung them into one of Allenby’s 
cavalry brigades coming from the southwest, only 
two thousand remained. 

In all, Lawrence, Joyce, Jaffer, and Nuri, and 
their scattered force of wild Bedouins and regular 





oe ee 


DOWNFALL OF THE EMPIRE — 285 


camel corps had killed about five thousand of the 
Turks in this last phase of the campaign and cap- 
tured more than eight thousand of them, as well as 
one hundred and fifty machine-guns and thirty can- 
nons. In addition to the column of less than one 
thousand men who had started north from Akaba 
with Lawrence, Auda Abu Tayi and two hundred 
of the best fighting men of the Howeitat tribe took 
part in Lawrence’s war-dance around Deraa, also 
two thousand Beni Sakhr, “the Sons of Hawks,” 
from east of the Dead Sea, four thousand Rualla 
under Nuri Shaalan from the North Arabian Desert, 
one thousand Druses from the Hauran, and eight 
thousand Arab villagers from the Hauran. 

In a letter which he wrote to me more than a year 
after the war, Colonel Stirling, who had played a 
prominent rdle in this final raid, summed up the 
effects of what the Arabs had done to help Allenby 
overwhelm the Turks: 

“This, after all,” wrote Colonel Stirling, “was the 
main justification of our existence and of the money 
and time we had spent on the Arab Revolt. The 
raid itself was really very dramatic in that we started 
out, a small regular force of Arabs 400 strong and 
marched 600 miles in 23 days through unmapped 
Arabia and came in out of the blue—miles behind 
the Turkish main armies, and as an absolute sur- 
prise. Two days before the British advance in Pal- 
estine began we had cut three lines of railways and 
for five days allowed no trains to get through to the 


286 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Turkish armies. The result was that when their re< 
treat commenced they found all their advance food 
depots and ammunition dumps were exhausted, 
During these days we of course led a somewhat pre- 
carious existence, generally shifting camp twice in 
a night to avoid being surprised. We were only a 
very weak force then, you see, though by the time 
we got on and rushed Damascus, something like 
11,000 mounted Arabs had joined us.” 

Some of the Arab horsemen rode right on that eve- 
ning into Damascus, where the burning ammunition- 
dumps turned night into day. Back at Kiswe, just 
a few miles south of Damascus, and not far from 
where Saul of Tarsus was dazzled by the light that 
transformed him into Paul the interpreter of Chris- 
tianity, the glare of the fires from Damascus and the 
roar and reverberation of explosions kept Lawrence 
awake most of the night. He was completely worn 
out. From September 13 to 30, he had caught only 
occasional snatches of sleep. Mounted on a racing- 
camel or dashing about the country on an Arab steed, 
riding inside the turret of an armored car or flying 
about in one of the fighting planes, he had led the 
relentless existence demanded of him in this great 
emergency of the war. Now the end of the war 
was in sight in the Land of the Arabian Nights. But 
sleep was difficult because all night long the Turks 
and Germans were blowing up their ammunition- 
dumps eight miles north in Damascus. With each 
explosion the earth shook, the sky went white, and 





DOWNFALL OF THE EMPIRE 287 


splashes of red tore great gaps in the night as shells 
went off in the air. “They are burning Damascus,” 
Lawrence remarked to Stirling. Then he rolled over 
in the sand and fell asleep. 


CHAPTER XXV 


LAWRENCE RULES IN DAMASCUS, AND THE 
TREACHERY OF THE ALGERIAN EMIR 


dhe: next morning they saw Damascus in the 


center of its gardens as green and beautiful 
as any city in the world. The enchantment 
of the scene, “like a dream that visits the light slum- 
bers of the morning—a dream dreamed but to 
vanish,” reminded Lawrence of the Arab story that 
when Mohammed first came here as a camel-driver, 
upon seeing Damascus from a distance, he refused 
to enter, saying that man could only hope to enter 
paradise once. Coming out of the desert and be- 
holding this view, than which there is none more en- 
chanting and alluring in the world, it is no wonder 
Mohammed was sorely tempted and even trembled _ 
for his soul. Seen from afar, this oasis of verdure, 
rimmed round by yellow desert against a background 
of snow-capped mountains, is indeed a pearl in an 
emerald settng. So it is only natural that the 
desert-dweller should look upon it as an earthly 
paradise. 
As the sun-rays fell aslant, weaving a fairy gos- 
samer veil over the minarets and cupolas of this dream 


city, Lawrence and Stirling drove into Damascus in 
288 





LAWRENCE RULES DAMASCUS 289 


their famous Rolls-Royce, the Blue Mist. They 
went straight to the town-hall and there called a meet- 


ing of all the leading sheiks. Lawrence selected 


Shukri Ibn Ayubi, a descendant of Saladin, to act as 
the first military governor under the new régime. 
Then he appointed a chief of police, a director of 
local transportation, and numerous other officials. 
These details arranged, Shukri, Nuri Said, Auda 
Abu Tayi, Nuri Shalaan, and Lawrence, at the head 
of their Bedouin irregulars, proceeded through the 
streets of Damascus. 

The twenty-nine-year-old commander-in-chief of 
the greatest army that had been raised in Arabia for 
five centuries, who in less than a year had made him- 
self the most important man in Arabia since the days 
of the great Calif Harun al Rashid, made his official 
entry into this ancient capital of the old Arabian 
Empire at seven o’clock on the morning of October 
31. The entire population, together with tens of 
thousands of Bedouins from the fringes of the desert, 
packed the “street that is called straight” as Law- 
rence entered the gate, dressed in the garb of a 
prince of Mecca. All realized that at last their glori- 
ous city had been freed from the Turkish yoke. 
Howling dervishes ran in front of him, dancing and 
sticking knives into their flesh, while behind him came 
his flying column of picturesque Arabian knights. 
For months they had heard of the exploits of Shereef 
Lawrence, but now for the first time they saw the 
mysterious Englishman who had united the desert 


290 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


tribes and driven the Turks from Arabia. As they 
saw him come swinging along through the bazaars 
on the back of his camel, it seemed as though all the 
people of Damascus shouted his name and Feisal’s in 
one joyful chorus. For ten miles and more along 
the streets of this, the oldest city in the world that 
still remains standing, the crowds gave the young 
Englishman one of the greatest ovations ever given 
toany man. Dr. John Finley, of the American Red 
Cross, who came north with Allenby, said, in describ- 
ing it, that “there were scenes of joy and ecstasy 
such as may never be witnessed on this earth again. 
The bazaars were lined with hundreds of thousands 
of people. The ‘street that is called straight’ was so 
packed that the horses and camels could hardly 
squirm through. The housetops were crowded. 
The people hung priceless Oriental carpets from 
their balconies and showered Lawrence and his com- 
panions with silken head-cloths, flowers and attar 
of roses.” 

Fortunately for the Arabs, Allenby had ordered 
Light Horse Harry Chauvel to hold his Australians 
back and let Feisal’s advance-guard enter the city 
first, and Allenby also had not given any arbitrary 
orders regarding the establishment of a temporary 
government in Damascus. So Lawrence was astute 
enough to see to it that representatives of the Ara- 
bian army entered just ahead of the British, thereby 
giving Emir Feisal first possession. 

Colonel Lawrence remained in Damascus only four 





LAWRENCE RULES DAMASCUS 291 


days. But during that time he was the virtual ruler 
of the city, and one of his first moves was to visit the 
tomb of Saladin, where the kaiser, back in 1898, had 
placed a satin flag and a bronze laurel wreath inscribed 
in Turkish and Arabic: “From one great emperor to 
another.” ‘The wreath and inscription adorned with 
the Prussian eagle had irritated Lawrence on his 
pre-war visits to Damascus, and early in the cam- 
paign, when they were far south at Yenbo, Lawrence 
and Feisal had vowed that they would not forget 
Saladin’s tomb. The bronze wreath now adorns the 
office of the curator of the British War Museum, 
while the kaiser’s flag returned with me to America. 

During Lawrence’s brief rule of Damascus, the 
kaleidoscopic bazaars of that most orthodox of all 
Oriental cities were seething with excitement. Only 
his intimate acquaintance with the personal caprices 
of the conspirators behind the innumerable intrigues 
and counter-intrigues made it possible for him to 
control the situation. Even then there were thrilling 
incidents and danger from assassins. 

On November 2 a riot broke out in Damascus, a 
disturbance that might easily have blossomed into a 
counter-revolution. ‘The moving spirit in it was an 
Algerian emir, one Abd el Keder, who had long been 
an arch-enemy of King Hussein and his sons. ‘This 
blackguard was the grandson of the celebrated Emir 
Abd el Keder, who for many years had fought the 
French in Algiers and, when finally defeated, had 
fled to Damascus. His two grandsons, Emir Mu- 


2922 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


hammed Said and Emir Abd el Keder, played an 
unsavory part in the war in the Near East. The 
former served as an agent of the Germans and Turks 
in Africa, where he exhorted the Senussi of the Sa- 
hara to invade Egypt, while his younger and even 
more truculent brother, Abd el Keder, as a super- 
spy for Enver Pasha, joined the Shereefian army. 
A mock escape from Constantinople gave Abd el 
Keder all the alibi needed for him to get into the 
good graces of the Arabs, and when he arrived 
across the desert at Feisal’s headquarters in Akaba 
he posed as an Arab Nationalist. In fact, so plaus- 
ible and eloquent was he, and so seemingly genuine 
were the promises of codperation which he made, 
that even King Hussein welcomed him to Mecca and 
gave him an honorary title. 

Then when Allenby launched his first great drive 
which resulted in the capture of Beersheba, Gaza, 
Jerusalem, and Jericho, Lawrence was asked to co- 
operate by destroying an important railway bridge 
between the Turkish army and its Damascus base. 
It so happened that Abd el Keder was the feudal 
lord controlling much of the region round about the 
bridge, and when Feisal discussed the project with 
him he at once begged to be allowed to take part in 
the raid. But after accompanying Lawrence on his 
trek north for many days, until the party was actu- 
ally within a few miles of the bridge, Abd el Keder 
and his cavalcade of followers galloped off in the 
desert night and delivered the details of Lawrence’s 





LAWRENCE RULES DAMASCUS 2938 


plan to the German and Turkish staff. Although 
this left him with only a few men, Lawrence never- 
theless made a desperate but unsuccessful attempt 
to destroy the bridge, an adventure from which he 
barely escaped with his life. 

~The Turks at first suspected their Algerian spy 
of double-crossing them and of really having turned 
pro-Arab, but they finally released him and then 
showered him with honors. Later on, when Allenby 
made his last great drive toward Damascus, Abd el 
Keder was sent among the Syrian villagers to cajole 
them into remaining loyal to their Ottoman rulers. 
But when the cunning Algerian and his brother saw 
that the Turkish retreat was degenerating into a 
débdcle, their enthusiasm for their friends, Enver, 
Talaat, and Djemal, vanished, and they galloped to 
Damascus several hours ahead of Allenby and Law- 
rence, hurriedly organized an Arab civil government 
with themselves as the heads, and prepared a trium- 
phal welcome for the approaching British and Hedjaz 
armies. But, naturally, they were a bit nonplussed 
to find the victors led by Colonel Lawrence, who per- 
emptorily ordered them to resign and then appointed 
men of Emir Feisal’s choice in their stead. This so 
upset and enraged the intriguing brothers that they 
drew their weapons and would have attacked Law- 
rence had the others present at the council not dis- 
armed them. Then these two unpleasant but im- 
mensely rich Algerian emirs collected together the 
members of their own personal body-guard, who were 


294 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


mainly exiles like themselves, and paraded through 
_ the streets making impassioned speeches denouncing 
Emir Feisal and King Hussein as puppets of Law- 
rence and the British. They called upon the Damas- 
cenes to strike a blow for the faith and launch a new 
rebellion. Rioting soon broke out, and it took Law- 
rence’s men six hours to clear the town. ‘The rioting 
soon degenerated into pure looting, and it was neces- 
sary for Lawrence, General Nuri Pasha, Shukri 
Ayubi, and the other leaders of the Shereefian force to 
resort to machine-gunning in the central square of 
Damascus and impose peace by force, after killing 
and wounding a score or more. ‘The two turbulent 
Algerian emirs managed to hide, and for a month 
they kept under cover, while they planned a new re- 
bellion. But Abd el Keder’s restless and impulsive 
spirit got the better of his discretion, and in a mo- 
ment of passion he seized his rifle, leaped on his 
charger, and galloped down to Feisal’s palace, shout- 
ing for Feisal to come out and fight him, and then 
started shooting. So persistent was he that one of 
the Arab sentries, who had taken to cover, sent a 
rifle-ball through his head and thus abruptly ended 
the adventures of the Algerian emir. 

After the fall of Damascus, the combined British 
and Arabian forces occupied the Syrian seaport of 
Beyrouth, where the famous American university is 
located that has done so much to inoculate the Near 
East with the spirit of democracy. Here an inci- 
dent occurred that warned the Arabs of the diplo- 





LAWRENCE RULES DAMASCUS 295 


matic troubles ahead of them. As in the case of 
Damascus, the Shereefian forces, through the local 
people, took over the reins of government, but a few 
days later a French representative (accompanied by 
a British officer) came along and demanded that the 
Arab flag be hauled down from the town-hall so that 
the French tricolor could be raised in its stead. 
Whereupon the Arab governor laid his pistol on the 
table and said: “There is my revolver. You may 
shoot me if you like, but I will not take down the 
flag!’ However, after another three days Allenby 
wired that no flag at all should fly over Beyrouth, 
and that a French officer should rule the city in the 
name of all the Allies. From that date the Arabs 
had to fight an all-uphill battle on the field of diplo- 
macy to keep from losing what they had fought for 
on the field of war. And once again their champion 
was young Lawrence. 

From Beyrouth the united British and Arab forces 
pushed on north to Baalbek, the City of the Sun, 
where, in the days of the decline of the Roman Em- 
pire, men had erected the mightiest temple on earth, 
the columns of which still remain one of the won- 
ders of the world. 

Still unsatisfied, Allenby’s armored cars and 
Feisal’s racing camelmen under the dashing Arab 
general, Nuri Said, swept on north until they had 
driven the Turks out of Aleppo, one of the most 
important strategical points in the East, so far as 
the Great War was concerned. And then, if the 


296 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Turks had not put down their arms, they would have 
been driven north into the Golden Horn. 

When Allenby and Lawrence captured Damascus 
and Aleppo and then cut the Berlin-to-Bagdad 
Railway, the dream of the kaiser and the Junkers 
for a Mitteleuropa reaching from the Baltic to the 
Persian Gulf vanished into thin air! 

When Turkey threw in her lot with the kaiser, she 
asserted that she could mobilize an army of over a 
million men. But of that million some fifty per 
cent were of Arab stock, and from the outbreak of 
the Arabian revolution to the final collapse of Tur- 
key it is estimated that approximately four hundred 
thousand of them deserted! The phenomenal num- 
ber of desertions was due mainly to two factors: the 
Arab Nationalist propaganda which Lawrence and 
his associates had spread throughout the Near East, 
and the brilliant success of the Arabian revolution. 
In fact, the desertions alone more than repaid the 
Allies for backing the Shereefian cause. 


In our swift journey north from Akaba to Aleppo 
with Lawrence, we have made no reference to the 
sacred city of Medina and the fate of the important 
Turkish garrison there. Although Holy Arabia was 
now no longer under Turkish rule, Ottoman forces 
still occupied the city famed for the tomb of the 
Prophet. To be sure, Feisal’s brother, Emir Ab- 
dullah, had long kept it surrounded with an army; 
and indeed the fact that the Turks had managed to 





LAWRENCE RULES DAMASCUS 297 


hold on to Medina had proved to be one of the 
blessings of Allah for the Arabs because all of the 
supplies required by the garrison were shipped down 
across the desert from Syria, and Lawrence had seen 
to it that a very considerable part went to the Arabs 
instead of the intended destination. In fact Law- 
rence’s crop of tulips, planted along the Damascus- 
Medina railway, had brought forth a bountiful har- 
vest of Turkish food-supplies, ammunition, and other 
military stores. 

In explaining the reason for not driving the Turks 
out of Medina, writing in “The Army Quarterly,” 
Colonel Lawrence said: “ . we were so weak 
physically that we could not let the metaphysical 
weapon rust unused. We had won a province when 
we had taught the civilians in it to die for our ideal 
of freedom; the presence or absence of the enemy was 
a secondary matter. 

“These reasonings showed me that the idea of as- 
saulting Medina, or even starving it quickly into sur- 
render, was not in accord with our best strategy. 
We wanted the enemy to stay in Medina and in every 
other harmless place in the largest numbers. The 
factor of food would eventually confine him to the 
railways, but he was welcome to the HedjJaz railway, 
and the trans-Jordan railway, and the Palestine and 
Damascus and Aleppo railways, for the duration of 
the war, so long as he gave us the other nine hundred 
and ninety-nine thousandths of the Arab world. If 
he showed a disposition to evacuate too soon, as a step 


298 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


to concentrating in the small area which his numbers 
would dominate effectively, then we would have to 
try and restore his confidence, not harshly, but by re- 
ducing our enterprises against him. Our ideal was 
to keep his railway just working, but only just, with 
the maximum of loss and discomfort to him.” 

In fact, so little of what was sent down from Syria 
ever reached the garrison that for months prior to 
the Armistice this isolated Turkish force in Medina 
had been reduced to a diet of nothing but dates, gath- 
ered from the palms for which the oasis is celebrated. 
Even the roofs of all the houses in the city had been 
torn down and used for fuel. But still the garrison 
would not give in, for the commander, Fakhri-ed-din, 
was a courageous, determined, stubborn, and fanati- 
cal general. 

Even when the news reached him that the combined 
British and Arab armies had captured Damascus and 
Aleppo, and the Turkish forces in Syria had been 
completely overwhelmed and compelled to sign an 
armistice, and even though Fakhri Pasha knew that 
it was futile for him to attempt to hold out any 
longer, since the war was all over and he and his gar- 
rison were isolated in the midst of the desert a thou- 
sand miles from Constantinople, still this Turkish 
tiger refused to acknowledge defeat. 

Days went by, and then weeks elapsed. The 
Medina garrison was now reduced to worse straits 
than the British at Kut-el-Amara before the sur- 
render of Townsend. Of the twenty thousand men 





A SYRIAN VILLAGER 





IK OF ARABY 


A SHE 


LAWRENCE RULES DAMASCUS 299 


who had made up the defending force, less than 
eleven thousand now remained. But still Fakhri 
Pasha swore on the Koran that rather than surrender 
to the Arabs and British he would blow up the Tomb 
of Mohammed and wipe out himself and all of his 
men. The British even guaranteed Fakhri that he 
and his troops would be protected from any possible 
rapacity of the Bedouin, but still the old tiger stood 
like adamant. 

His troops, however, were not so fanatical and 
longed to get back to their homes in Anatolia. So 
they finally mutinied, arrested their gallant com- 
mander-in-chief, and surrendered the city to Emir 
Abdullah on January 10, 1919, months after the war 
was all over. Surely the name of General Fakhri- 
ed-din deserves a high place in Turkish history; for 
generations to come Arab mothers of Medina will use 
it as a means of hushing their babes. 

After the dramatic surrender of Medina, Fakhri 
Pasha was no longer heard of in the Near East and 
seemed to have completely vanished from the picture. 
But sometime afterward, when we were traveling in 
little known parts of Central Asia, I encountered the 
defender of Medina in the city of Kabul, at the court 
of the emir of Afghanistan. He apparently had lost 
none of his fire, and in his capacity of Turkish am- 
bassador to the Afghans was reported to be doing 
his utmost to keep the emir of Afghanistan from be- 
coming friendly with the British in India. 

If Turkey had a million fighting men with the 


300 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


fighting spirit of Fakhri-ed-din, she not only could 
regain all of her old provinces but could conquer the 
Near East and build up an empire that would surpass 
the ancient glory of the Great Moguls. 





CHAPTER XXVI 


TALES OF THE SECRET CORPS 


LTHOUGH none played quite so spectac- 

A ular a part as Lawrence, there were at least 

a score of other dashing officers who distin- 

guished themselves in Arabia, and a volume might 

well be, and in fact should be, written ‘about the 
exploits of each. 

All of Britain’s codperation with the Arabs was 
arranged by a secret service department, the Near 
Eastern Intelligence Corps, created in the days when 
Sir Henry McMahon was still high commissioner for 
Egypt. Upon his retirement the control of. this 
branch of the service passed on to his successor, Sir 
Reginald Wingate, and to Sir Edmund (now Field- 
Marshal Viscount) Allenby. Although these three 
distinguished men each personally encouraged the 
Arabs and took an active interest in the Shereefian re- 
volt, no man among those who did not actually visit 
Arabia deserves more credit for the success of the 
revolution than Sir Gilbert F. Clayton, the organizer 
of this secret corps. 

During the early days of the operations in the Near 
East, General Clayton made his headquarters in 
Cairo. There he gathered together a group of bril- 

201 





- 802 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


liant men who were each intimately acquainted with 
some corner of the Near East and with some 
one particular group of its bewildering mosaic 
of peoples. Among them were students of 
political affairs, men like Mark Sykes and Aubrey 
Herbert; then there was Hogarth, the famous anti- 
quarian and geographer; Cornwallis and Joyce, vet- 
erans from the Sudan; Woolley and Lawrence, who 
were engaged in archeology in Mesopotamia; and 
many others, including an engineer-adventurer of 
reckless daring by the name of Newcombe, whom 
Lawrence described to me as “‘the most devastatingly 
energetic person in the world.” 

Although Colonel Lawrence had more train dem- 
olitions to his credit than any one else, he was not 
the man who first introduced the gentle sport of 
tulip-planting in Arabia. That honor must go to 
Lieutenant-Colonel S. F. Newcombe, who might even 
have exceeded Lawrence’s record as a train-wrecker 
and railway-demolisher had not his fearless spirit and 
love of fighting resulted in his spending the final 
stages of the war in a Turkish prison. 

Prior to 1914 Newcombe had earned the reputation 
of being the ablest engineer in the British army. The 
railway line which crosses the Sudan Desert from the 
valley of the Nile to the Red Sea was one of his 
efforts. Always a pioneer, he had surveyed and 
blazed trails in Abyssinia, Persia, and various other 
regions that are mere blobs on the map to most of us. 

So engrossed did he become in each job that he also 





TALES OF SECRET CORPS 303 


gained renown for his forgetfulness as well as for his 
daring. After the capture of E] Wedj, in the early 
days of the Hedjaz revolt, he was placed in tem- 
porary command of that port. Living with him were 
several other officials, but as the colonel happened to 
be the only one who had a servant they were all 
obliged to depend upon him for mess arrangements. 
But Newcombe attended to this unimportant phase 
of his day’s activity in the most casual manner, if at 
all, and when one o’clock came around and some one 
suggested, “Now for a bit of lunch,” it usually de- 
veloped that Newcombe had forgotten to give instruc- 
tions; and as a result they would have to compromise 
by telescoping lunch and tea at two o’clock. 

Colonel Newcombe played a meteoric part in 
Arabian affairs for seven months and initiated the 
methods of railway destruction which Lawrence after- 
ward applied so effectively. Although he donned 
Arab garb he was utterly un-Oriental in his ways and 
plunged headlong into his work both day and night at 
such a furious pace that no one could keep up with 
him. ‘Then at the end of seven months in the desert 
he rejoined the British army in Palestine and in the 
attack on Beersheba carried out one of the most dar- 
ing actions of the war. 

Allenby’s cavalry and infantry were closing in on 
Beersheba from the west, south, and east. But to the 
north of that ancient home of Abraham runs the 
Beersheba-Hebron-Jerusalem Road, in those days the 
main artery of the Turkish line of communications. 


304 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Newcombe, and one hundred Australians who had 
volunteered to follow him, crept through the Turkish 
lines by night just before the attack on Beersheba was 
launched. ‘Their job was to attempt to cut the He- 
bron Road and hold up all Turkish supplies and 
reinforcements until Allenby and his army had routed 
the Turkish forces and taken Beersheba. It was a 
desperate thing to attempt, but for three days and 
nights Newcombe and his band of Australians re- 
mained astride that road and outfought fifty times 
their number. Eventually they were surrounded on 
a hill-top, and the few lucky enough to be in alive 
were captured. 

It happened that Colonel Newcombe was the high- 
est ranking British officer whom the Turks had thus 
far captured in Palestine, and so they made quite a 
fuss over him when he was paraded through the — 
streets of Jerusalem on his way to prison in Anatolia. 

’ But months later, after having survived smallpox 
and all of the other luxuries of Turkish prison life, 
the colonel escaped from his cell in Constantinople 
through the aid of a beautiful Syrian girl, who then 
concealed him in her home. ‘This was shortly before 
the Turkish collapse, and Newcombe, preferring the 
thrills of life in disguise in Constantinople to the mo- 
notony that might follow complete escape from Tur- 
key, remained in Stamboul in order to start an under- 
ground bureau of propaganda right in the heart of 
enemy territory. So successful was he that even- 
tually he got into touch with a group of prominent 


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TALES OF SECRET CORPS 305 


Turks who were opposed to the pan-German policy 
of Talaat and Enver, and he even helped them ar- 
range the Armistice which resulted in Turkey’s drop- 
ping out of the war. Then, as any born hero of melo- 
drama would be expected to do as the climax to his 
romantic career, he married the beautiful Syrian girl 
who had helped him escape—and we hope lived 
happily ever after. | 

Among the men most actively engaged in arrang- 
ing British aid for the Arabs and in advising them on 
military matters were Colonel C. EK. Wilson, Colonel 
K. Cornwallis, Lieutenant-Colonel Allan Dawney, 
and Commander D. G. Hogarth. Colonel Wilson 
was the governor of the Red Sea Province of the 
Sudan when Shereef Hussein and his sons first over- 
threw the Turks in Mecca, and he engineered con- 
siderable surreptitious gun-running to keep the revolt 
alive until the Allies had time to make up their minds 
officially to help the Arabs. Colonel Wilson loaded 
British ships with ammunition and rifles at Port 
Sudan and then transferred them to sailing dhows 
in the middle of the Red Sea. ‘These dhows then 
landed the supplies secretly along the Arabian coast, 
where they were distributed to the Bedouins. But 
after the fall of Mecca and Jeddah he left his ad- 
ministrative work in the Sudan and crossed over to 
Jeddah, where he remained in charge of British ac- 
tivities in the southern Hedjaz and as adviser to 
Shereef Hussein until the termination of the war. 
In fact it was Colonel Wilson, in company with Gen- 


306 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


eral Clayton and Ronald Storrs, the Oriental sec- 
retary to the high commissioner for Egypt, who 
opened up the first negotiations between Britain and 
the leaders of the Arab revolt. In spite of poor 
health Colonel Wilson did particularly fine work. 

Cornwallis, Dawney, and Hogarth spent the most 
of their time at headquarters in Cairo at what was 
known as the Arab Bureau. Colonel Cornwallis, 
who after the war was sent to Mesopotamia as one of 
the principal British advisers to Feisal when that emir 
was proclaimed king in Bagdad, was in charge of the 
Arab Bureau. He personally superintended the 
political side of the work which codperation with the 
Arabs entailed, such as official negotiations between 
Britain and the newly established government of the 
kingdom of the Hedjaz, and the important business 
of the subsidy which was granted to King Hussein to 
enable him to continue his campaign. In addition 
Colonel Cornwallis supervised the extremely impor- 
tant work of winning recruits for the Shereefian army 
from the Ottoman troops of Arab blood who were 
in the prison-camps of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and 
Mesopotamia. Lawrence often referred to the 
genius of Cornwallis and seemed to regard him as 
indispensable to Arab success. 

Another brilliant officer who divided his time be- 
tween the Arab Bureau in Cairo, the desert, and 
Allenby’s headquarters in Palestine was Lieutenant- — 
Colonel Allan Dawney of the Coldstream Guards. © 
Although responsible for putting the Arabian cam- © 





TALES OF SECRET CORPS 307 


paign on a proper and efficient military basis for 
personnel and service of supply, Dawney’s main task 
was that of keeping Emir Feisal, Colonel Lawrence, 
and the other leaders in Arabia in constant touch with 
Allenby. Lawrence and he were intimate friends 
and worked in perfect harmony. Dawney did every- 
thing possible to wangle the equipment and every- 
thing else that Lawrence required. THe also saw to 
it that his own visits to Arabia allowed him enough 
time to take part in a few raids, for he too was an 
ardent tulip-planter. 

But so unusual was the nature of the desert war 
that it required the diplomatic genius of at least one 
man to act as an intermediary between Arabia and 
the Imperial Government in London. This delicate 
task was left to a scholarly man of international re- 
noun whose suggestions could therefore hardly be 
disregarded even by a prime minister and his War 
Cabinet. Sir Gilbert Clayton here again proved 
himself a genius at selecting men by choosing D. G. 
Hogarth, head of the Ashmolean Museum of Ox- 
ford, for this post, and in Hogarth he not only picked 
a man famous as an antiquarian and archeologist but 
one who had long been looked upon as the foremost 
living authority on Arabia. Here again Lawrence 
was favored by fortune in being associated with one 
who could hardly have been more ideally qualified, 
for Commander Hogarth (he was given an honorary 
naval commission to increase his official prestige) 
had known Lawrence from childhood and had given 


308 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


him his start in the field of archeology. Throughout 
the campaign Commander Hogarth was looked upon 
by Lawrence and his colleagues as their counselor, 
philosopher, and mediator whose delicate task it was 
to justify the various steps taken in Arabia to the 
General Staff and the War Cabinet. He also edited 
the secret publication at headquarters in Cairo called 
“The Arab Bulletin,” of which only about four copies 
per edition were printed: one for Lloyd George and 
his Cabinet, one for Allenby and staff, one for Law- 
rence and associates in the desert, and one for the file 
at the Arab Bureau. 





CHAPTER XXVIT 


JOYCE & CO., AND THE ARABIAN KNIGHTS OF 
THE AIR 

y \HE forces of the king of the Hedjaz, as pre- 

viously stated, included both regulars and ir- 

regulars; the latter were Bedouins mounted 
on camels and horses, while the former were deserters 
from the Turkish army, men of Arab blood con- 
scripted into the Ottoman armies and afterward cap- 
tured by the British in Palestine and Mesopotamia. 
There were nearly twenty thousand regulars specially 
trained as infantry to attack those fortified positions 
which could not be taken by Lawrence’s irregulars; 
they were under the leadership of Lieutenant-Colonel 
P. C. Joyce, who like Lawrence was an Irishman, 
and who next to Lawrence probably played a more 
important role in the campaign than any one else. 
Unlike Lawrence, Joyce was a soldier by profession, 
an officer in the Connaught Rangers with a splendid 
record for service in the Boer War and in Egypt and 
the Sudan. Physically there was a further difference 
between them, for while Lawrence stood barely five 
feet three his colleague loomed well over six feet 
three. None but the largest ship of the desert could 


navigate under Joyce’s bulk, so that he seldom 
309 





310 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


mounted a camel. But when he did, it looked like 
one mountain on top of another. 

Colonel Joyce spent nearly a year building up an 
army to send against the strongly fortified city of 
Medina. It was to be under the leadership of Emir 
Ali, At last, when by the grace of Allah all seemed 
in readiness, a courier from Emir Ali handed a mes- 
sage to Joyce to be forwarded on to his Majesty the 
king in Mecca with all possible despatch. ‘The mes- 
sage read: 


O Father of Mercies and Lord of the Earth, greetings 
from thy son: 

Thy heroic army awaits but the command for its 
victorious advance upon the Turks. Yet for lack of one 
mere detail are we delayed. Our valorous officers swear 
that it would be futile for them to advance without swords. 
Wherefore I implore thee to send thirty of thy Damascus 
blades in scabbards of beaten gold in order that they may 
be satisfied. 

Tuy Suave. 


But fortunately Colonel Joyce proved himself 
capable of coping with the thousand and one unex- 
pected difficulties that arose, for in addition to his 
ability to speak Arabic he had many other valuable 
qualifications. For instance he was tactful and cool 
and utterly imperturbable, could not be hustled under 
any circumstances, was painstaking, and above all 
patient beyond the normal vanishing-point of pa- 
tience as practised in the Occident. So while Laws 


ee Cabin 
ie Oo Eg ee a ge eer ee, ne eee 


€ 
€ 
id 





JOYCE & CO. 311 


rence spent his time with his Bedouin rabble, Joyce 
demonstrated his military ability by building up the 
auxiliary force of regulars from the medley of 
Syrians, Palestinians, and Bagdadis who were at- 
tracted to the Shereefian banner. But he also now 
and then found time to join Lawrence on a raid or 
to lead a demolition expedition of his own. In fact 
on one occasion he destroyed seven small bridges and 
tore up two thousand rails on the Turkish railway, 
between the stations of Toweira and Hedia. 

There were a number of other officers who fought 
with the Arabs and took part in the fascinating game 
of planting tulips and blowing up the Turkish rail- 
way. Among these were Lieutenant-Colonel W. F. 
Stirling, Major P. G. W. Maynard of the Irish 
Rifles, who had been a judge in a remote corner of the 
Sudan, Major H. W. Young, Major William E. 
Marshall, Captain E. Scott Higgins, Captain H. S. 
Hornby, and Lieutenant H. Garland, who taught 
demolition to the Arabs. Nearly all of the men who 
fought in Arabia had annexed various military honors 
long before they were selected to play a part in the 
war in the Land of the Arabian Nights, but none had 
been quite so generously decorated as Stirling, who 
not only was a veteran of the South African War but 
had found time to serve with high distinction in the 
Royal Flying Corps before he crashed and nearly lost 
his life while on a reconnaissance flight over one of 
the most inhospitable corners of Arabia. Doomed 
to serve the remainder of the war on the ground, he 


312 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


was selected as the right type of man for the Hedjaz 
show. He joined the Arabs just as they were about 
to invade Syria and was with Lawrence when the 
latter reached Damascus. Young, formerly of the 
Intelligence Department in Mesopotamia, was an- 
other who reveled in the manipulation of high ex- 
plosives. During the final stage of the campaign he 
took over the all-important job of organizing the 
transport system, but among his numerous achieve- 
ments by no means the least was the success he met 
in raising a silky beard that was the envy of his col- 
leagues and which transformed him into an ideal 
sheik. 

Perhaps the most universally liked, both by British 
and Arabs, of all the Kuropeans who took part in the 
desert war was Lawrence’s tent-mate and intimate 
friend, an optimistic Scot of the Royal Army Medical 
Corps with a Highland brogue thicker than Harry 
Lauder’s, who divided his affections between his 
bacillus menagerie and tulip-planting. Under him 
were two other medical men, Captains Ramsay and 
McKibbin. But Major Marshall, although a quiet, 
shy man of science whose whole life had been devoted 
to the realm of test-tubes, microscopes, and a search 
for mysterious microbes in the jungles of tropical 
Africa, had proved himself enough of a soldier to win 
the Military Cross in the battle of the Somme and 
other honors in Arabia. When Lawrence was away 
on an expedition Marshall would transform their tent 
at Akaba into a zoo for cholera, typhus, and plague 





JOYCE & CO. 313 


bacillus. Incidentally he usually managed to con- 
tract most of the diseases the mysteries of which he 
sought to solve. Then on his trips into the desert he 
would fill his stretchers with high explosives and after 
a raid would throw out all the remaining dynamite 
and substitute the wounded. After inflicting cas- 
ualties among the Turks he would proceed to bandage 
them up. So successful was he as a combined med- 
ical officer and soldier that after the war he was ap- 
pointed adviser to the king of the Hedjaz and for 
several years remained at Jeddah as the British 
resident. 

Bui of all the tulip-planters there was certainly 
none more daring than Captain H. S. Hornby, who 
like Newcombe had been an engineer. He had re- 
ceived his preliminary schooling in adventure on the 
Gold Coast, in the heart of the Congo, and in other 
out-of-the-way corners of the earth, and so reckless 
was he that even the wild Bedouins regarded him as 
stark mad. But his career as a dynamiter of trains 
came to an untimely end when a part of a mine ex- 
ploded in his face, leaving him partially blind and 
deaf. The Arabs who were with him had great diffi- 
culty in getting him back to Akaba alive, and from 
then on he spent his time in administrative work. 

At the base-camp in Akaba were two other officers, 
Major T. H. Scott, of the Inniskillng Fusiliers, and 
Captain Raymond Goslett. Scott specialized in 
mirth and money, while Goslett dispensed everything 
from boots to flour. In Scott’s tent were boxes of 


314 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


sovereigns, gold conscripted from every corner of the 
Empire to help arouse enthusiasm in the breasts of 
the temperamental Bedouins whenever the spirits of 
those rather fickle gentlemen began to flag. The 
only guardian of all these boxes of golden “goblins” 
was a dog about the size of a squirrel, which Major 
Scott called his Bulgarian weasel-hound. His asso- 
ciate, Captain Goslett, was the czar of the supply 
and commissary department, excepting when Auda 
Abu Tayi or some of Lawrence’s other brigands 
could no longer resist the temptation of looting their 
own base-camp. 

Then there were the officers in command of the 
armored cars and light mobile artillery: Captains 
Gillman, Dowsett, and Brodie, and Lieutenants 
Greenhill, Wade, and Pascoe. Although seriously 
handicapped by lack of roads, they somehow managed 
to scale the barren mountains and get into action on 
many occasions, and they were mixed up in innu- 
merable thrilling adventures during the latter stages 
of the campaign. 

But of all the unpleasant jobs, surely the airmen 
who were sent down to satisfy the Arabs, who insisted 
that their army like the Turks should have birds that 
laid explosive eggs, were the least to be envied. 
With Akaba as their base-camp they would sally 
forth to locate approaching Turkish patrols and bomb 
the enemy garrisons along the Damascus-Medina 
Railway. Nowhere in the world have aviators ever 
taken greater risks except perhaps in East Africa 





JOYCE & CO. 315 


and on the Afghan frontier. When a plane left 
Akaba the pilot and observer knew full well that if 
they encountered engine-trouble they were in for it, 
because they were constantly flying over unexplored, 
unmapped country, as uninviting as the mountains of 
the moon. On one occasion when we were trekking 
across the mountains of the Edom on our way to the 
“rose-red city of Petra,’ we heard the drone of a 
battle-plane overhead, and as we gazed about at that 
jagged, unfriendly landscape, with the blue Arabian 
sky punctured everywhere by sharp lava mountains, 
our admiration for those reckless British Elijahs, 
soaring thousands of feet above us, increased ap- 
preciably. 

These sheiks of the air were first under a Captain 
Harold Furness-Williams; although during the later 
stages of the campaign an embryo parson, Captain 
Victor Siddons, became the flight-commander. On 
one occasion Furness-Williams flew from Egypt to 
Arabia, by way of the Sinai desert. Hung around 
the fuselage and back struts he carried a precious 
cargo consisting of four dozen bottles of Bass, which 
his fellow-sufferers in that thirsty land had commis- 
sioned him to bring. But under the eyes of his ex- 
pectant friends the unfortunate aviator made a bad 
landing, the plane turned over, and every bottle was 
smashed. ‘They told him that they would sooner have 
seen his blood soaking into the sands of the desert 
than that priceless liquid. 

Captain Furness-Williams and his associates spent 


316 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


a portion of their spare time in taking the Arab chiefs 
for joy-rides. They gave old Auda Abu Tayi his 
first “flip,” and that cheerful chieftain, who had al- 
ready demonstrated his courage by marrying twenty- 
eight wives, with the inborn poetic spirit of the desert 
declared upon his return to earth that he deeply re- 
gretted he had failed to take his rifle aloft with him. 
Never, he said, had he had such a splendid opportu- 
nity for taking pot-shots at all his “friends” im 
Akaba. 

Among the Arabian knights of the air were Lieu- 
tenants Divers, Makins, Oldfield, Sefi, and several 
others, but the only one of them who went right 
through the campaign to Damascus was Lieutenant 
Junor, who dropped bombs during nearly every Arab 
battle and survived to play a similar role on the 
equally wild Afghan Frontier in India long after the 
World War. 

In the southern area were a number of other of- 
ficers of whom I saw little or nothing, men like 
Colonel A. C. Parker, a nephew of Kitchener, who 
was on the Red Sea coast for a short time and then 
appointed governor of the vast mountain and desert 
region called the Sinai Peninsula, where the children 
of Israel wandered for forty years. ‘There also was 
Lieutenant-Colonel J. R. Bassett, transferred to 
Arabia from the War Office in London, who was 
second in command to Colonel Wilson at Jeddah, 
and Major H. J. Goldie, who described his head- 
quarters in Jeddah as so hot that nothing could live 





JOYCE & CO. 317, 


there but human beings, and they could just gasp. 
Over around Medina, where Emir Abdullah’s army 
made things lively for the large Turkish garrison, 
were two more demolition experts, Majors W. A. 
Davenport and H. St. J. Garrood. 

But this brief enumeration of the other Europeans 
who played a part in the desert war would not be 
complete without reference to the French. Early in 
September, 1916, the French indicated their faith in 
the Arab cause by sending a mission to Jeddah under 
the leadership of a Colonel Bremond. The French 
were at a great disadvantage simply because their 
Government could not give them sufficient backing 
and the British had to furnish nearly everything for 
them. ‘This made it difficult for them to get a strong 
hold over the Arabs, because the latter were aware of 
the circumstances. But Captain Pisani, who led a 
detachment of French Algerians throughout the cam- 
paign, had had unlimited experience in the Moroccan 
Desert and did splendid sporting work against the 
Turkish railway in 1917, and again in the final opera- 
tions around Deraa in 1918. 

The only other foreigners in the Hedjaz were some 
mixed Egyptian troops and a Mohammedan machine- 
gun section from India. 

One of the finest sporting achievements during ee 
war in the Near East was accomplished by a British 
civilian official, a Mr. H. St. John Philby, who played 
no part in the Hedjaz campaign, but who startled 
King Hussein one day by turning up in Bedouin 


318 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


costume at his summer capital of Taif. Philby had 
been sent on a secret mission to the court of Ibn Saud 
in the very heart of Central Arabia, and he had ac- 
complished the remarkable feat of trekking right 
across Arabia from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea 
through a totally unknown region. Lawrence was 
so impressed with Philby’s achievement and his skill 
in dealing with the Bedouins, that after the war he 
was instrumental in having Philby appointed adviser 
to the sultan of Transjordania. 

Perhaps the most genuine-looking brigand of all 
the Europeans who fought in the Arab rebellion was 
the Earl of Winterton. He wore a huge beard and 
an Arab head-cloth and rode a tall racing-camel be- 
decked with gorgeous trappings. Lord Winterton 
turned out to be as much of a fire-eater in the field as 
he was back home in the House of Commons when on 
one occasion a member from the Whitechapel district 
interrupted him while he was making a speech. The 
earl wheeled round, gave the disturber a withering 
look, and shouted, ‘Silence in the Ghetto,” and the 
House simply howled. 

In the desert the noble earl managed to look as dis- 
reputable as possible and in appearance was as suc- 
cessful a brigand as Auda Abu Tayi himself. One 
day Lord Winterton in his sheik’s regalia came riding 
along on his camel on his way from Jaffa to Allenby’s 
headquarters near Ramleh. There is a particularly 
attractive stretch of road between those two Pales- 
tinian cities, but during the war all natives on camels 





JOYCE & CO. 319 


or donkeys or on foot were instructed to take a side 
path so that the road could be reserved for the in- 
terminable caravans of motor-lorries and whizzing 
staff cars. Right up the middle of that sacred motor 
highway came Lord Winterton, ambling along on his 
camel on a mission from the Arab army to Allenby. 
A military police sergeant, on point duty directing 
traffic, saw him and shouted, “Get off the road, you 
black bounder!” Winterton placidly continued on 
his way; he was not accustomed to being addressed 
with such levity and naturally assumed that the ser- 
geant was speaking to some one else. But the latter 
shouted again: “I say, you black beggar, —— 
can’t you hear me talking to you? I said get off pie 
road and over there where you belong.” 

Winterton pulled up his dromedary at this and re- 
plied as only one of his social standing could reply: 
“Evidently, old chap, you don’t know who I am. I 
am a major, a member of Parliament, and an ear]!” 
Whereupon the sergeant nearly collapsed but man- 
aged to salute weakly and stammer: “Proceed, my 
lord, proceed,” or words to that effect. 

The most of the officers in Arabia were either 
colonels, lieutenant-colonels, or majors. But rank 
made very little difference, and there was a free- 
masonry among them such as did not exist on any 
other front. Saluting was taboo, and in addressing 
each other titles were dispensed with. Even when 
Lawrence had the opportunity to become a general 
he declined the honor and gave as his reason that he 





320 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


preferred not to be elevated in rank beyond his asso- 
ciates. Each man had his own task and went his own 
way. ach was a free-lance and conducted himself 
with much the same freedom as did the knights 
of old. 

In a letter written home from Arabia during the 
latter part of the desert war by Colonel R. V. Bux- 
ton, who was in command of the Camel Corps sent 
over from Palestine to codperate with the Shereefian 
force, this army officer said of Lawrence: “He is 
the most wonderful of fellows and is our guide, phi- 
losopher, and friend. Although he is only a boy to 
look at and has a very quiet manner, he is known to 
every Arab in this country for his exploits. He lives 
entirely with them, wears their, clothes, and eats only 
their food. He always travels in spotless white and 
in fact reminds one of the Prophet. He has practi- 
cally started all this movement here and is a won- 
derful enthusiast.” 





CHAPTER XXVIII 


FEISAL AND LAWRENCE AT THE BATTLE OF PARIS 


EF'TER the fall of Damascus and the com- 
A plete overthrow of the Turkish armies, and 
after he had helped establish a provisional 
government for his friend Emir Feisal, young 
Lawrence laid aside the curved gold sword of a prince 
of Mecca, packed his pure white robes and his richly 
brocaded ones, in which he had been received with all 
the honor due an Arab shereef, and hurried to Lon- 
don. His penetrating eyes had pierced to the end 
of an epoch-making perspective, involving empires 
and dynasties and a new balance of power in the Near 
East. He had achieved the seemingly impossible; 
had united desert tribes that had sworn eternal en- 
mity to one another; had won them over to the Allied 
cause and helped Allenby put an end to German and 
Turkish ambitions for Near Eastern mastery. 

But Lawrence realized that his work was not yet 
finished. He was determined that the great powers 
should not forget the promises made to their Arab 
allies. ‘The battle of the peace conference was still 
to be fought. So Lawrence returned to Europe tc 
prepare for the arrival of the Arab delegates. 


An amusing incident occurred when Lawrence 
321 





322 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


passed through Marseilles, where he landed in order 
to travel overland to London. He stepped into the 
British railway transport officer’s headquarters at the 
station to inquire the time of the next through train 
to Le Havre. It was a drizzly day, and Lawrence 
was wearing a dingy trench-coat, without insignia, 
over his uniform. Although Lawrence was a full 
colonel at this time, he still looked like an insignificant 
shave-tail lieutenant. The R.T.O. happened to be 
a lieutenant-colonel, a huge fellow, with a fierce mus- 
_tache. When his visitor asked quietly about trains, 
the R.T.O. glanced up, gave Lawrence a withering 
look, and blusteringly told him that he could n’t be 
bothered and that Lawrence should see his assistant. 
Without a word Lawrence walked out, but in the 
next room he took off his water-proof, and strolled 
right back into the R.T.O.’s august presence again, 
this time saying even more quietly than before, 
“What time did you say the next rapid leaves for Le 
Havre?’ For the moment the R.T.O. looked as 
though he would like to wring Lawrence’s neck, but, 
catching a glimpse of the crown and two stars on his 
caller’s shoulder, he jumped to his feet, saluted, and 
stammered: 

“I beg your pardon, sir. I beg your pardon.” 

Nothing delights Lawrence more than to take a 
self-important man down a peg or two. ‘There is no 
fuss and flurry or pomposity in his own make-up, and 
it amuses him when he occasionally encounters a 
blusterer who tries to play up stage. 





FEISAL AND LAWRENCE 323 


Emir Feisal and staff were transported across the 
Mediterranean on board H.M.S. Gloucester as the 
guests of his Imperial Britannic Majesty. The 
French were considerably perturbed when they heard 
that an Arabian delegation was on its way to the 
peace conference, and they objected to its being rec- 
ognized. France coveted Syria and realized that 
Feisal and his persistent young British grand vizir 
would attempt to thwart them. But Feisal started 
for Paris despite the coolness of the French. 

Like all orthodox Mohammedans, the emir never 
touches intoxicants, and complications were narrowly 
averted on board the Gloucester because of the fact 
that several of the members of Feisal’s staff, unlike 
their prince, were not ardent prohibitionists. Al- 
though they could not regale themselves publicly for 
fear of incurring the emir’s displeasure, they would 
spend half an hour or so in the ward-room with the 
ship’s officers before dinner; and General Nuri Bey, 
who had been Feisal’s foremost strategist during the 
desert war, even ventured to take his glass to the 
table, and, although he sat opposite the emir, he 
cleverly concealed it behind the water-bottle so that 
Feisal could not see it. 

On the voyage from Alexandria to Marseilles the 
Arab delegation was accompanied by Lawrence’s 
tent-mate, Major Marshall, who wondered just how 
the French were going to receive his charges upon 
arrival in port. When the Gloucester steamed into 
Marseilles there was an official French mission on the 


324 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


dock, but no British representatives; and the French 
indicated by their attitude to Marshall that further 
British interest in Feisal would not be welcomed and 
that all matters concerning Syria were purely the 
affairs of France. So Marshall sent a wire of in- 
quiry to the British Embassy in Paris, and a few 
hours later Lawrence turned up. With his usual tact 
he avoided friction with the French by borrowing 
_Marshall’s Arabian head-dress and attaching himself 
to Feisal’s delegation as a member of the emir’s per- 
sonal staff and not as a British officer. 

When the delegates assembled in Paris, Emir Fei- 
sal took up his headquarters at the Hotel Continental 
on the rue de Rivoli. Wherever the Emir went, 
whether to an informal meeting or to an official con- 
ference, he was usually accompanied by the slightly 
built, insignificant-looking youth in the uniform of a 
British colonel. Few people at the peace conference, 
however, were aware that this young man had virtu- 
ally led the Arabian armies during the war and was 
almost as important a figure in the Arab delegation 
as Emir Feisal himself. 

Prince Feisal was quite the most imposing figure 
at Paris. In his flowing robes he was the center of 
attention wherever he went and continually sought 
by artists, photographers, and writers. But pub- 
licity was almost as distasteful to Feisal as it was to 
Lawrence, and so they would get up at six o'clock 
in the morning, throughout the conference, in order 
to go rowing in the Bois de Boulogne and escape the 





FEISAL AND LAWRENCE 325 


curious crowd, which, attracted by the picturesque 
dress and stately figure of the Arabian emir, fol- 
lowed always at his heels. 

Flattery he was quick to detect. A distinguished 
Frenchman, M. Dubost, eulogized him somewhat 
fulsomely in the course of an after-dinner speech at 
the Hotel de Ville. When it was over a Moroccan 
interpreter asked the emir how he liked it. Feisal’s 
only reply was, “Has n’t he beautiful teeth?” 

To induce the Arabs to fight in the World War, 
Britain had made certain promises which French 
interests made it extremely difficult to fulfil. But 
during the peace conference Feisal’s tact and personal 
charm did much to win friends for the Arabian cause 
in Paris. No one ever came away from him in an 
angry mood. On one occasion, at a meeting of the 
Council of Ten, M. Pichon referred to the claims of 
France in Syria, which he said were based on the 
Crusades. Emir Feisal listened respectfully, and 
when the French statesman had finished his address 
he turned toward him and inquired politely, “I am 
not a profound student of history, but would you 
kindly tell me just which one of us won the crusades?” 

Lawrence’s personal attitude regarding the peace 
conference was straightforward and simple: if Great 
Britain was not going to guarantee independence to 
the Arabs and if she proposed to leave them in the 
hands of the French so far as their Syrian aspirations 
were concerned, for his part he intended to devote 
his energies and talents to helping his Arab comrades 


326 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


in arms contest France’s claims and obtain the rights 
for which they had so valiantly fought. 

During the war the British had sponsored the 
Arabian movement for independence and made it 
possible for King Hussein and his sons to maintain 
their army against the Turks. The French, on the 
other hand, had merely sent a small detachment to 
Arabia, which could hardly even have survived had 
it not been for the supplies it received from Lawrence 
and his British colleagues. But the embarrassing 
fly in the ointment was the “you-take-this, and-I’ll- 
take-that” compact between the British and French 
in which it had previously been decided that France 
was to have Syria as her sphere of influence. Emir 
_Feisal and Colonel Lawrence felt sure if that com- 

pact was adhered to in the face of Arab claims that 
Syria would become a French colony despite the fact 
that the bulk of her population wanted neither 
French control nor French codperation. 

In presenting the Arabian case and in coaching 
Emir Feisal to meet the delegates on their own 
ground, Lawrence was a match for any diplomat at 
the peace conference. He had the geography of 
Arabia, Syria, and Palestine at his finger-tips. He 
spoke many of the dialects of the Near East. He 
had lived with the Ansariya, the Yezedis, the Ismailia, 
the Metawileh, the Christian Maronites of the 
Lebanon. He had broken bread with the Druses and 
sat around the coffee-hearths of nearly every tribe 
of the desert. He could hold forth for hours on the 


| 
5 
| 





FEISAL AND LAWRENCE 327 


intricate political relations, religions, and tribal feuds 
of the Arabs and their neighbors. The cities of 
Syria were as familiar to him as London and Oxford. 
Sitting in a hotel room overlooking the garden of the 
Tuileries in Paris, he made the ancient cities of the 
East live in vivid phrases for frock-coated gentlemen 
who had never deviated from the straight streets of 
continental capitals. 

Lawrence admitted that Beyrouth, the foreign 
door of Syria, was French in feeling and in language, 
in spite of its Greek harbor and its great American 
university. But he insisted that Damascus, the his- 
toric city of Syria, long the seat of lay government 
and the religious center, was pure Arab, whose sheiks 
were orthodox “Meccan” in their opinions and ex- 
ceedingly anxious to be free from alien rule. He 
also argued that the great industrial cities of Hamah 
and Homs were more jealously native than any 
other Syrian centers. 

He maintained that the Arabian case rested on 
four important documents, which he described as 
follows: 

“First: ‘The British promise to King Hussein of 
October, 1915, which undertook, conditional on an 
Arabian revolt, to recognize the ‘independence of the 
Aarbs’ south of latitude 37 degrees, except in the 

Mesopotamian provinces of Bagdad and Basra, and 
- except where Great Britain might not consider herself 
‘free to act without detriment to the interests of 
France.’ 


328 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


“Second: The Sykes-Picot Agreement made be- 
tween England and France in May, 1916, which 
divided the Arabian provinces of Turkey into five 
zones; roughly, (a) Palestine from the Jordan to the 
Mediterranean, to be ‘international’; (b) Haifa and 
Mesopotamia from near Tekrit to the Gulf, to be 
‘British’; (c) the Syrian coast from Tyre to Alex- 
andretta, Cilicia, and almost all southern Armenia 
from Sivas to Diarbekir, to be ‘French’; (d) the in- 
terior (mainly the provinces of Aleppo, Damascus, 
Urfa, Deir, and Mosul) to be ‘independent Arab’ 
under two shades of influence: (1) between the lines 
Akaba-Kuweit and Haifa-Tekrit, the French to seek 
no ‘political influence’ and the British to have eco- 
nomic and political priority, and the right to supply 
‘such advisors as the Arabs desire’; (2) between the 
line Haifa-Tekrit and the southern edge of French 
Armenia or Kurdistan, Great Britain to seek ‘no 
political influence’ and the French to have economic 
and political priority and the right to supply ‘such 
advisors as the Arabs desire.’ 

“Third: The British statement to the seven 
Syrians of Cairo dated June 11, 1917. This assured 
the Syrians that pre-war Arabian states, and Arabian 
areas freed by military action of their inhabitants 
during the war, should remain entirely independent. 

“Fourth: The Anglo-French Declaration of No- 
vember 9, 1918, in which Great Britain and France 
agreed to encourage native governments in Syria and 
Mesopotamia, and without imposition to assure the 





FEISAL AND LAWRENCE 329 


normal working of such governments as the people 
themselves should adopt. 

“All these documents were produced under stress 
of military urgency to induce the Arabs to fight on 
our side. 

“I can find no inconsistencies or incompatibilities 
in these four documents,” said Lawrence, “and I know 
nobody else who can. It may then be asked what is 
the cause of the difficulties among the British, French, 
and Arabs. It is mainly because the agreement of 
1916, second document, is unworkable and no longer 
satisfies the British and French Governments. As, 
however, it is, in a sense, the ‘charter’ of the Arabs, 
giving them Damascus, Homs, Hamah, Aleppo, and 
Mosul for their own, with such advisors as they them- 
selves judge they need, the necessary revision of this 
agreement is a delicate matter and can hardly be 
made satisfactorily by England and France without 
giving weight and expression also to the opinion of 
the third interest—the Arabs—which it created.” 

The problem was, indeed, a delicate and intricate 
one to handle. Great Britain had entered into certain 
agreements with France and had made definite 
promises to the Arabs and other promises to the 
Zionists. Emir Feisal was frankly opposed to 
France. He claimed that the new Arabian King- 
dom should include all of Syria, Mesopotamia, 
and Palestine. France, by all the etiquette of old 
diplomacy, considered that she had special and 
incontestable rights in Syria, dating from the Cru- 


330 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


saders. The French had founded educational in- 
stitutions throughout the country, financed railways, 
and engaged in other forms of peaceful penetration. 
They considered themselves the historical protectors 
of the Christians in Syria. The Zionists were look- 
ing forward to a cultural state in Palestine under the 
protection of the British. All these varied and in 
some cases conflicting interests had to be considered 
and, if possible, satisfied. 

_ Emir Feisal, backed up by Lawrence’s advice, in- 
sisted that the new Arabian state should include, not 
only the Hedjaz, but all Mesopotamia, Syria, and 
Palestine as well. Feisal would not listen to any 
proposal that Palestine should ever become a Jewish 
state. From his point of view, and in this he rep- 
resented the opinion of the whole Arab world, Pales- 
tine could not be looked upon as a separate country, 
but as a province which should remain part and parcel 
of Syria. He maintained that, as there was no 
natural boundary and no frontier between the two 
countries, what affected one must affect the other, 
and that both from a geographical and racial stand- 
point Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia were in- 
separable. At the same time he raised no objection 
to the Zionist proposal to encourage the immigration 
of the Jews into the country, and to allow the Jews 
to have full control of their own schools, establish a 
Jewish cultural center, and participate in the govern- 
ment of Palestine. 

“The Jews, like ourselves, are Semites,” agreed 





FEISAL AND LAWRENCE 331 


Emir Feisal. “And instead of relying upon any of 
the great powers, we should like to have the codpera- 
tion of the Jewish people for assistance in building 
up a great Semitic state. I appreciate fully Zionist 
aspirations, even extreme Zionist aspirations. I 
understand the desire of Jews to acquire a home-land. 
But so far as Palestine is concerned, if they have 
made up their minds that it is to be Palestine or 
nothing, then it must be Palestine subject to the 
rights and aspirations of the present possessors of the 
land. Palestine is still in effect the land of the Arabs 
and must remain an integral part of the Arabian 
state.” 

Feisal, quite naturally, took an immediate and in- 
timate view of the territorial rights and_ political 
aspirations of the Arabs. He was personally con- 
cerned in the establishment of an Arabian state and 
in all the problems that might threaten its success. 
But Lawrence, with his sixth sense and his imagina- 
tive understanding of the rise and fall of empires, ap- 
praised events in terms of rounded periods rather 
than of years. The Arabian question, the Palestine 
question, the Syrian question, must all sift and 
change with the sands of time. 

In spite of all the diplomatic circumlocution, red 
tape, and super-politeness that veneered the pro- 
ceedings in Paris, Emir Feisal was under no delusion 
as to the true spirit that permeated the peace con- 
ference, and before he and Lawrence would start out 
to attend one of the meetings Feisal would playfully 


3382 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


unsheathe his gold dagger and whet it a few times on 
his boot. 

The emir is a keen wit and many stories are told 
of his clever retorts in Paris. After he had been at 
the conference for a few weeks some one asked him 
to give his opinion of modern statesmen as a result 
of what he had thus far seen of them. He replied: 
“They are like modern paintings. They should be 
hung in a gallery and viewed from a distance!” 

The final outcome of the battle of the peace confer- 
ence was a partial victory for Emir Feisal and Colo- 
nel Lawrence. ‘They did not get all that they had 
asked for, nor did they expect to. France was given 
control of Beyrouth and the Syrian coast; Britian ac- 
cepted a mandate over Palestine; but the Arabs were 
allowed to retain control of the interior of Syria and 
to make their beloved Damascus the capital of their 
new state. 


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CHAPTER XXIX 


LAWRENCE NARROWLY ESCAPES DEATH; ADVENTURES 
OF FEISAL AND HUSSEIN 


URING a lull in the long siege in the 
1) council-chambers at Paris, Lawrence had 
one more adventure. He had left his dia- 
ries and nearly all of his important papers relating 
to the campaign in a vault in Cairo, because the Medi- 
terranean was still infested with German U-boats 
when the Turkish armistice was signed and when he 
returned from the Near East. So after the prelim- 
inary work of the peace conference had been com- 
pleted, Lawrence found himself in need of his notes 
and papers. 

He heard that ten British machines—giant 
Handley-Page planes, with Rolls-Royce engines, 
that had seen service in many a night raid over Ger- 
many—were leaving for Egypt to blaze a new air- 
route from London to Cairo. Lawrence promptly 
arranged to accompany them. But the machines 
were old and nearly worn out, and the pilots were 
daredevil chaps who literally ran their planes to 
pieces. In fact, some of the pilots had never flown a 
Handley-Page, and some of their mechanics had 


never even worked on a Rolls-Royce engine. On the 
333 


334 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


way from Cologne to Lyons five forced landings 
were made. Nearly all the planes had to be rebuilt 
several times during the journey to Egypt. 

The Air Ministry in London had vaguely directed 
the squadron to an aérodrome at Rome. When the 
pilots reached the Eternal City, they flew back and 
forth across the Tiber, over St. Peter’s, the Colos- 
seum, the Forum, and up and down the Appian 
Way, but nowhere on any of the Seven Hills could 
they spot a landing-ground. Finally the pilot of 
Lawrence’s plane saw what he thought might be an 
aérodrome. But when he swooped down it turned 
out to be a stone-quarry. Just before reaching the 
quarry he saw his mistake, switched on the engine, 
and tried to ascend again. Unluckily he was unable 
to get up sufficient flying speed. ‘The machine raced 
along the ground, then bolted over the edge of the 
quarry, and crashed down into a tree-top. 

Lawrence was seated in the gun-pit. The occu- 
pants had a vague impression of a tree coming toward 
them at amazing speed. Suddenly there was a noise 
like the crack of a machine-gun. In the flash of a 
second the great plane toppled over on its nose and 
right wing and splintered into match-wood. Both 
pilots were killed outright. The two mechanics, who 
were seated with Lawrence in the rear in the machine- 
gunner’s compartment, were pitched out on their 
heads. One suffered concussion of the brain; the 
other was merely stunned. As soon as the second re- 
covered consciousness he began to dig Lawrence out 





_ 


LAWRENCE ESCAPES DEATH = 335 


of the débris. The colonel’s shoulder-blade, collar- 
bone, and three ribs were broken. In the excavating 
process, which took ten minutes, the mechanic kept 
sputtering excitedly that the plane might catch fire 
any minute. Lawrence replied, “Well, if she does, 
when [I arrive in the other world I may find it chilly.” 

In spite of the accident, however, Lawrence 
jumped into another plane a few days later and con- 
tinued his flight to Egypt. “Our strangest sensa- 
tion,’ he afterward told me in Paris, “was breakfast- 
ing on the isle of Crete and dining the same day in 
Cairo, seven hundred miles away.” After he had 
gathered up his papers, and still somewhat shaken up 
as a result of his aérial interlude, he returned to the 
seats of the mighty in Paris. 

At the conclusion of the peace conference. Emir 
Feisal and staff visited London and then made a tour 
of the British Isles. Colonel Lawrence took delight 
in showing his Arab friends around. Everything 
was new to several of the sheiks who had just arrived 
from Arabia, and one would have expected them to 
be tremendously impressed by the subways, the auto- 
mobiles, and the thousand and one wonders of the 
capital of the British Empire. But these things 
merely excited a supercilious, sheik-like smile. They 
were too proud ever to show any signs of surprise, 
except on one occasion in their room at the Ritz. 
They were dumfounded when they turned on the 
water-faucets and found that one ran hot and the 
other ccld. In the holy Kovan, they said, they had 


386 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


been told of the fountains of paradise, which flow 
with milk or with honey at will; but they had never 
heard of earthly fountains such as these in the Ritz. 
After alternating them a bit and making quite sure 
that they themselves were not dreaming, they told 
Lawrence they wanted to take some of those magic 
faucets back to Arabia so that they could carry them 
in their camel-bags to supply them with hot and cold 
water while trekking across the desert! 

On one occasion Emir Feisal visited Glasgow and 
was entertained at a great civic banquet. He had 
been so busy seeing the sights along the Clyde that 
when it came time to respond to the toast in his honor 
he was unprepared. ‘The only other person present 
who could understand Arabic was Colonel Lawrence, 
who sat beside him to act as his interpreter; and 
Emir Feisal leaned over and whispered in his ear: 
“T have n’t a thing to say, so I am going to repeat 
the passage from the Koran on the cow. When you 
get up to interpret you can tell them anything you 
like!’ It happens that the passage on the cow is one 
of the most sonorous and euphonious parts of the 
Koran, and the business men of Glasgow were tre- 
mendously impressed by the marvelous flow of elo- 
quence that rolled like Niagara from the lips of the 
Oriental monarch, never dreaming that he was sim- 
ply reeling off the Prophet Mohammed’s dissertation 
on the cow. 

Shortly before he returned to the Near East the 
emir was entertained at a banquet in London, and 


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LAWRENCE ESCAPES DEATH 387 


Lord Balfour during the course of a conversation 
tried to find out what Emir Feisal thought of the 
British Government. He succeeded. “It reminds 
me of a caravan in the desert,” replied the George 
Washington of Arabia. “If you see a caravan from 
afar off, when you are approaching it from the rear, 
it looks like one camel. But, riding on, you see that 
camel tied to the tail of the next, and that one to the 
tail of the next, and so on until you come to the head 
of the caravan, where you find a little donkey leading 
the whole string of camels.” Lord Balfour won- 
dered to just whom the emir was referring! 

When Feisal returned to Syria the people again 
‘welcomed him as their liberator, and after a few 
weeks they proclaimed him King of Syria, with Da- 
mascus as his capital. But this new state was short- 
lived, for without foreign codperation to help him 
finance his government his position soon became im- 
possible. After using up his own private fortune in 
a vain attempt to develop order out of chaos, he was 
obliged to leave Damascus, and the French at once 
arbitrarily occupied the whole of Syria. For the mo- 
ment it seemed as though Feisal’s hopes were shat- 
tered. But Lawrence and the other British leaders 
who had been associated with the Arabian Revolution 
still had another card to play. 

All through these turbulent days Emir Feisal’s 
father had continued to strengthen his position in the 
Hedjaz. Galloping out of Mecca in the gorgeous 
Arabian twilight, a slight, lean figure was often seen 


3888 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


by the Bedouins of the desert; it was Hussein, their 
King, on a night journey to Jeddah, forty miles away. 
No music precedes him, nor stately pageantry; he 
rides alone and a-muleback. 

Although at the moment this is written he holds 
in the world to-day a position second only to that of 
the pope in Rome, he lives so simply that he prefers 
a mule to any other conveyence. But for mules he is 
a connoisseur and a fan. South America, Australia, 
and Abyssinia are combed for his favorite steeds; but 
the best of all, according to King Hussein, is the good 
Missouri “hard-tail.”’ 

Simple, even severe in his tastes, Hussein is a rigid 
upholder of the Volstead clauses in Al Qu’ran. After 
a gloriously successful train-wrecking expedition, two 
of Lawrence’s Arab officers went up to Mecca on a 
week’s leave, taking along in their grips something 
stronger than rose-water, with which to celebrate. 
This breach of piety reached the ears of the king, who 
had the officers beaten in public. After that no one 
chose Mecca as the Arabian Montreal. 

The Arabs are inordinately fond of talking- 
machines, but King Hussein has prohibited them in 
Mecca, believing them to be the invention not of 
Edison but of the devil. Although he himself prefers 
the life of a nomad and his real sympathies are with 
the Bedouins, he is even more severe with the tribes- 
men of the black tents than with the Arab townsfolk. 

One day he was resting in the cool shelter of date- 
palms in an oasis with a circle of Bedouins squatting 





aa — 


LAWRENCE ESCAPES DEATH = 339 


around him on their prayer-rugs. Out of the corner 
of his eye, he observed one of these Arabs slip the 
kuffieh belonging to his neighbor under the folds of 
his robes. A moment later, the owner returned and 
missed his handsome head-dress. Every one denied 
seeing it, including the culprit. Hussein stood up, 
terrible in his wrath, and strode over to the guilty 
man. 

“Varlet, where is thy brother’s kuffieh?” he de- 
manded. 

“Master of mercies, I know nothing of it,” stam- 
mered the terrified man. 

“Thou liest!”’ growled Hussein, and, picking up the 
gnarled club that formed part of his regal trappings, 
he dealt the man a terrific blow in the ribs. The 
thief collapsed in a heap and died next day. 

Hussein, as the Grand Shereef of Mecca, was the 
sixty-eighth of his dynasty. As king he was the first 
of a new line. Now, as ruler-elect of the Moham- 
medan world, he revives the supremacy of his ancient 
clan, the Qu’reish, from whom the Prophet himself 
was descended. He is a man of keen intelligence, 
and those who know him best say that he has a natural 
gift for diplomacy. Certainly he will need every 
ounce of it if he is to keep his present difficult position 
as caliph over the divided and distracted Moslem 
world of to-day. Many do not acknowledge him. 
Even in his own Arabia, the powerful schism of the 
Wahabis pays him but scant attention. In fact the 
present sultan of the Central Desert and head of the 


oh 


340 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


puritanical Wahabis, is King Hussein’s great rival 
and one of the strongest men in Arabia to-day. Early 
in the war, according to Mr. H. St. John Philby, 
“Sir Percy Cox, who accompanied the Mesopota- 
mian Expeditionary Force as Chief Political Officer, 
immediately sent Captain Shakespear to spur Ibn 
Sa’ud into active operations against the Turks and 
their natural ally, Ibn Rashid. The campaign was 
launched in January, 1915, and I have always thought 
that, had it not been for the unfortunate accident of 
Shakespear’s death in the very first battle between 
the rival forces, Colonel Lawrence might never 
have had the opportunity of initiating and carrying 
through the brilliant campaigns with which his name 
is associated, and as the result of which he entered 
Damascus in triumph at the head of the army of 
the Hedjaz.” 

Mr. Philby followed Captain Shakespear into the 
Central Desert ruled over by Ibn Sa’ud, and he had 
a tremendous admiration for that potentate. But by 
the time Mr. Philby was sent to Ibn Sa’ud’s country 
the Hedjaz revolt was at its height and Colonel Law- 
rence was well on his way toward Damascus. Mr. 
Philby made an extraordinary journey through the 
unknown heart of Arabia and turned up rather un- 
expectedly at the summer capital of King Hussem 
in the mountains near Mecca. 'The aged monarch in 
greeting the explorer called him the Lawrence of 
Nejd. 

In the Wahabi sect sons can kill fathers or fathers 





LAWRENCE ESCAPES DEATH 341 


can kill sons who do not join. A man can also 
be killed for smoking a cigarrette. These Moham- 
medan Puritans want to abolish the pilgrimage to 
Mecca and blot out all shrines, such as the sacred 
Kaaba and the Tomb of the Prophet in Medina. 
Ibn Sa’ud was the head of a powerful force of fight- 
ing men, and after the World War he had captured 
the city of Hail, his old enemy Ibn Rashid’s capital, 
and made himself the ruler of the whole of Central 
Arabia. | 

King Hussein also has a number of other rivals. 
The Emir of Morocco claims the pontificate by virtue 
of descent through another branch of the illustrious 
Qu’reish. The Turks have proclaimed a republic, 
and Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha undoubtedly hopes 
to seize the scepter of the Ottomans and become in 
fact if not in name the supreme ruler in Islam. India 
is puzzled, and the doctors of Al Azhar have up to 
date made no pronouncement on Hussein’s status. 

Much, no doubt, is going on behind the scenes. 
We of the West are prone to underestimate the im- 
portance of Mohammedanism; one day there may be 
a rude awakening, for it is the creed of one fifth of 
the world and is an active and proselytizing creed 
making converts in London as well as equatorial 
Africa. 

Like the waves of unrest and religious fervor and 
splendid hope that passed through Christendom at 
the time of the Crusades, so now, from Sudan to 
Sumatra, there are ominous signs of another and 


3842 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


darker movement. Men are muttering: “Verily 
those who disbelieve our signs, we will surely cast to 
be broiled in hell-fire; so often as their skins shall be 
well burned we will give them other skins in exchange, 
that they may taste the sharper torment, for God 
is mighty and wise. But those who believe and do 
right, we will bring them into gardens watered by 
rivers.” 

The times are difficult for a ruler of Islam, but no 
one has a better claim than Hussein to the great in- 
heritance to which he has been called by popular 
acclamation at Bagdad. 

F'rom time immemorial the desert has been a con- 
fused and changing mass of blood-feuds and tribal 
jealousies. To-day there are no blood-fueds among 
the Arabs from Damascus to Mecca; for the first 
time in the history of Arabia since the seventh century 
there is peace along all the pilgrim road, thanks to 
King Hussein and his sons. 

Although he is only five feet two inches in height, 
his regal bearing does not belie his ancient lineage 
and his high ambition. At sixty he is still a man 
of exceptional vigor, although that is not common 
in men of his age in the Southern Arabian Desert. 

His hands, delicate and beautiful as a musician’s, 
impress one with a sense of power and finesse; whether 
or no they will be able to control the two hundred and 
fifty millions of the great brotherhood of Islam is one 
of the fascinating problems of the future. 

But the real hope for the future of Arabia is 





LAWRENCE ESCAPES DEATH 3438 


centered in his son, King Feisal, who realizes that the 
Arabs need European and American assistance in 
educational and industrial fields, and Feisal is eager 
to inaugurate many changes that may revolutionize 
Arabia. 

On the other hand, King Hussein is desirous that 
both Mecca and Medina should remain isolated from 
the world, during his lifetime, at least. “I am an 
old man,” says he, “and happy with things as they 
are, but I realize that changes must come.” It is 
possible that after the king has ruled Mecca for 
a few more years he may retire and allow Feisal, 
Abdullah, and Ali to attempt to work out their great 
plan for a United States of Arabia. In this event 
even Mecca may be opened up to the Christian and 
unbeliever, for Feisal and his brothers are thoroughly 
modern and do not sympathize with the fanaticism of 
old Arabia. ‘They have already prevailed upon their 
father to introduce electric lights in Mecca. 

Feisal, like his father, is a man of great personal 
courage. Were he not, he would never have united 
his ignorant and fanatical followers in a common 
brotherhood as he did. In the early days of the 
revolt, he was by turns rifleman, company com- 
mander, and army commander. ‘The Bedouins were 
the only men he had, and they were meeting artillery- 
fire for the first time in their lives and did n’t like it 
a bit. Feisal had to lead them in camel charges, 
bring up the rear in retreat, and defend narrow places 
in the mountains with his own rifle. At the time 


344 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


they had few rifles and no stores, and Lawrence has 
revealed the fact that he kept up the spirit of his 
men with the thought of material rewards to follow 
by filling his treasure-chest with stones and ostenta- 
tiously loading it on a camel. 

Lawrence believes that Feisal has a combination of 
qualities admirably fitting him for the leadership of 
the new Arab state which may rise out of the ashes 
of the old Ottoman Empire. Lawrence is of the 
opinion that Feisal will go down in history, next to 
Mohammed and Saladin, as the greatest Arab who 
ever lived. He was and still is the soul of the Arab 
movement. He lives only for his ideals and for his 
country. His only thought is for the future of 
Arabia. That he and his father were liberal-minded 
enough to take advantage of the genius and unique 
ability of a European unbeliever, a mere youth 
many years their junior, seems incredible to any one 
who knows the Mohammedans of the Near East, 
because, to the average Moslem Arab, all Christians 
are dogs; but King Hussein and his enlightened son 
even went so far as to accept their fair-haired British 
advisor as a fellow-Arabian prince and an honorary 
shereef of Mecca, a title which had always been re- 
served in the past for direct descendants of the 
Prophet, and which had never before been awarded 
to any other person, either Moslem or Christian. 


CHAPTER XXX 


LAWRENCE FLEES FROM LONDON, AND FEISAL 
BECOMES KING IN BAGDAD 


ITER the peace conference, and after Emir 
A Feisal had returned to Damascus, Lawrence 
vanished. Many of his friends thought that 
he had returned to Arabia to resume the role of 
mystery man. But I doubted this, for when I had 
last talked to him in Paris I had asked him point- 
blank if he intended to go back to the East in order 
to help the Arabs build up their new state. His an- 
swer was most emphatically in the negative. 

“T am not going to return for some years—perhaps 
never,” he said. “It would not be for the good of 
the Arabs for me to be there. As a matter of fact, 
I have n’t the remotest idea of what I will do. The 
war has so completely upset my life that it may take 
me several years to find myself. In the meantime 
I hope to discover a secluded corner somewhere 
in England, far from war, politics, and diplomacy, 
where I can read a bit of Greek without being inter- 
rupted.” 

His attitude regarding return to the Near East 
seemed to me another indication of his far-sightedness. 


During their war of liberation, the Arabs had fol- 
345 


346 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


lowed Lawrence partly because of his own personal: 
ity but mainly because he offered them a substitute 
for Turkish oppression. He well knew that as soon 
as the excitement of war disappeared his power over 
them would diminish. What would have happened 
if he had returned to the Near East? What would 
have been the outcome if he had temporarily gained 
a position of political authority equivalent to the mil- 
itary position he had attained in Arabia? It is con- 
celvable that, because of his tremendous influence 
over the Arabs during the war, he might at the out- 
set have had a large following. But in a few months 
some one would have raised the ery, “Away with the 
infidel!’ If he had returned to Damascus simply in 
the capacity of advisor to Feisal, that alone might 
have undermined the emir’s hold over his people. 
The Arabs are jealous, fickle, and suspicious, and 
they would have accused Feisal of being a mere 
puppet. If Lawrence had craved power he might 
conceivably have made himself an Arabian dictator 
by turning Moslem. But nothing could have been 
more remote from his mind. He had not led the 
Arabs to gratify personal ambition. His sole motive 
was to defeat the Germans and Turks, and at the 
same time to help his friends the Arabs win their 
freedom. 

While the peace conference was still in session, 
many people said to me that young Lawrence was 
the person best equipped to represent Great Britain 
in the Near East and that he no doubt would return 





LAWRENCE FLEES 347 


to Syria and Arabia in an official capacity. But 
Lawrence’s one ambition was to take off his uniform, 
drop out of political and military life, and return to 
his archzological studies. 

I asked Nuri Pasha, one of the generals on Emir 
Feisal’s staff in Paris, how the Arabs intended to 
repay Colonel Lawrence for his great service to their 
country. He replied: “We have offered him 
everything we have, but he refuses to accept any- 
thing. But if he will consent, we wish to give him the 
exclusive archeological rights to all the buried cities 
of Arabia and Syria.” 

Lawrence had other plans, however. 

For months ofter the Peace Conference not even 
his most intimate friends knew what had become of 
him. Meanwhile I had returned to America and 
started a tour of the continent presenting the pictorial 
records of the Allied campaigns which Mr. Chase and 
I had prepared. But we were unexpectedly invited 
to appear for a season at Covent Garden Royal 
Opera-House, London, a thing we had never dreamed 
might occur, because our material had been obtained 
solely for America. Naturally one of the first things 
I endeavored to do upon arrival in England was to 
find Colonel Lawrence. I wanted to show him what 
Auda Abu Tayi and the rest of his Arabian knights 
looked like on the screen. Both at the War Office 
and the Foreign Office no one seemed to know what 
had become of him. He had apparently vanished into 
the blue just as he used to do in the desert. But a 


348 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


fortnight later I received a note from him. All it 
said was: 


My pear Loweuit THomas: 
I saw your show last night. And thank God the lights 
were out! 
T. E. Lawrence. 


I discovered that this man, whom all London 
would have been delighted to honor, was living incog- 
nito in a modest furnished room in a side street over 
the Dover tube-station. Not even his landlady had 
any suspicion of his identity. But he could not long 
keep it a secret. 

A few days later he came around and had tea with 
us. When he discovered that I was married and 
that my wife was with me, he seemed very much 
embarrassed and blushed all over. He implored me 
to return to America and to stop telling the public 
about his exploits. He said that if I stayed in 
London any longer life would not be worth living for 
him, because as a result of my production at Covent 
Garden he was being hounded night and day by 
autograph-fiends, reporters, magazine-editors, book- 
publishers, and representatives of the gentler sex 
whom he feared more than a Turkish army corps. 
He said that as a result of the two weeks I had been 
speaking in London he had received some twenty- 
eight proposals of marriage, and they were arriving 
on every mail, most of them via Oxford. 

When he came to call I noticed that he had two 





LAWRENCE FLEES 349 


books under his arm. One was a volume of Persian 
poems, and the other, judging by its title, was about 
the last book in the world that you would have ex- 
pected this young man to be reading—this man who 
had been called the Uncrowned King of the Arabs, 
who had achieved what no sultan and no calif had 
been able to do in more than five hundred years, who 
had refused some of the highest honors at the dis- 
position of the greatest governments of the world, 
who had been made an honorary descendant of 
the Prophet, and who will live in history as one 
of the most romantic and picturesque figures of 
all time. It was “The Diary of a Disappointed 
Man.” 

But when Lawrence found out that there was little 
immediate prospect of my sailing for America, and 
when he discovered that he was being followed by an 
Italian countess who wore a wrist-watch on her ankle, 
he fled from London. 

It was not long after this that Emir Feisal lost 
his throne in Syria, and there was a good deal of 
propaganda work being done by the French in order 
to encourage the British not to sponsor the Arab 
cause. So, despite the fact that he had gone into 
retirement and was trying to keep out of political 
affairs, Lawrence could not refrain from defending 
Feisal. Without appearing personally he began 
writing articles to the London papers, presenting the 
Arab side of the controversy. I will quote from one 
or two of them because they give one an idea of the 


350 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


versatility of this youth, who could wield a pen as 
ably as he could lead an army. 


There is a feeling in England [wrote Lawrence] that the 
French occupation of Damascus and their expulsion of 
Feisal from the throne to which the grateful Syrians had 
elected him is, after all, a poor return for Feisal’s gifts to 
us during the war: and the idea of falling short of an 
oriental friend in generosity leaves an unpleasantness in our 
mouths. Feisal’s courage and statesmanship made the 
Mecca revolt spread beyond the Holy cities, until 1t became 
a very active help to the allies in Palestine. The Arab 
army, created in the field, grew from a mob of Bedouins into 
an organised and well equipped body of troops. They 
captured thirty-five thousand Turks, disabled as many more, 
took a hundred and fifty guns, and a hundred thousand 
square miles of Ottoman territory. This was great service 
in our extreme need, and we felt we owed the Arabs a re- 
ward: and to Feisal, their leader, we owed double, for the 
loyal way in which he had arranged the main Arab activity 
when and where Allenby directed. 

Yet we have really no competence in this matter to 
criticise the French. They have only followed in very 
humble fashion, in their sphere of Syria, the example we 
set them in Mesopotamia. England controls nine parts 
out of ten of the Arab world, and inevitably calls the tune to 
which the French must dance. If we follow an Arab policy, 
they must be Arab. If we fight the Arabs, they must fight 
the Arabs. It would show a lack of humour if we reproved 
them for a battle near Damascus, and the blotting out of 
the Syrian essay in self-government, while we were fighting 
battles near Bagdad, and trying to render the Mesopo- 





See 


' 
; 
. 


LAWRENCE FLEES 351 


tamians incapable of self-government, by smashing every 
head that raised itself among them. 


Britain was having a turbulent time in Mesopota- 
mia just when the French had ousted Feisal from 
Syria. Lawrence felt that there ought to be a way 
of putting Feisal’s talents to some use in Bagdad, and 
this article was his diplomatic way of introducing the 
plan which afterward was developed and adopted. 


A few weeks ago [continued Lawrence] the chief of our 
administration in Bagdad was asked to receive some Arab 
notables who wanted to urge their case for partial autonomy. 
B.e packed the delegation with some nominees of his own, 
and in replying, told them that it would be long before they 
were fit for responsibility. Brave words—but the burden 
of them has been heavy on the Manchester men this week 
at Hillah. 

These risings take a regular course. There is a pre- 
liminary Arab success; then British reinforcements go out 
as a punitive force. They fight their way (our losses are 
slight, the Arab losses heavy) to their objective, which is 
meanwhile bombarded by artillery aéroplanes, or gunboats. 
Finally, perhaps, a village is burnt and the district pacified. 
It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions. 
Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women 
and children, and our infantry always incur losses in shoot- 
ing down the Arab men. By gas attacks the whole popu- 
lation of offending districts could be wiped out neatly; and 
as a method of government it would be no more immoral 
than the present system. 

We realise the burden the army in Mesopotamia is to the 


3852 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Imperial Exchequer, but we do not see as clearly the burden 
it is to Mesopotamia. It has to be fed, and all its animals 
have to be fed. The fighting forces are now eighty-three 
thousand strong, but the ration strength is three hundred 
thousand. There are three labourers to every soldier, to 
supply and serve him. One in ten of the souls in Mesopo- 
tamia to-day belongs to our army. The greenness of the 
country is being eaten up by them, and the process is not 
yet at its height. To be sure they demand that we double 
our existing garrison. As local resources are exhausted 
this increase of troops will increase the cost by more than 
arithmetical progression. 

These troops are just for police work to hold down the 
subjects of whom the House of Lords was told two weeks 
ago that they were longing for our continued presence in 
their country. No one can imagine what will be our state 
there if one of Mesopotamia’s three envious neighbours (all 
nursing plans against us) attacks us from outside, while 
there is still disloyalty within. Our communications are very 
bad, our defence positions all have both flanks in the air, 
and there seem to have been two incidents lately. We do 
not trust our troops as we did during the war. 

Then there are the military works. Great barracks and 
camps have had to be constructed, and hundreds of miles 
of military roads. Great bridges, to carry motor-lorries, 
exist in remote places, where the only local transport is by 
pack. The bridges are made of temporary materials, and 
their upkeep is enormous. They are useless to the civil 
Government, which yet has to take them over at a high 
valuation; and so the new State will begin its career with 
an enforced debt. 

English statesmen, from the Premier downwards, weep 


¥ ae a - “ e 
ne aye ee eee a eee, ee ea 


LAWRENCE FLEES 353 


tears over the burden thrust on us in Mesopotamia. “If 
only we could raise a local army,” said Lord Curzon, “but 
they will not serve” (except against us, his lordship no 
doubt added to himself). “If only we could find Arabs 
qualified to fill executive posts.” 

In this dearth of local talent the parallel of Syria is il- 
luminating. Feisal had no difficulty in raising troops, 
though he had great difficulty in paying them. However, 
the conditions were not the same, for he was arbitrarily 
deprived of his Customs’ revenue. Feisal had no difficulty 
in setting up an administration, in which the five leading 
spirits were all natives of Bagdad. It was not a very good 
administration, but in the East the people are less exigent 
than we are. Even in Athens Solon gave them not the best 
laws, but the best they would accept. 

The British in Mesopotamia cannot find one competent 
person, but I maintain that the history of the last few 
months has shown their political bankruptcy, and their 
opinion should not weigh with us at all. I know ten Brit- 
ish officials with tried and honourable reputations in the 
Sudan, Sinai, Arabia, Palestine, each and all of whom 
could set up an Arab Government comparable to Feisal’s, 
in Bagdad, next month. It also would not be a perfect 
government, but it would be better than Feisal’s for he, 
poor man, to pull him down, was forbidden foreign advisers. 
The Mesopotamian effort would have the British Govern- 
ment behind it, and would be child’s play for a decent man 
to run, so long as he ran it like Cromer’s Egypt, not like 
the Egypt of the Protectorate. Cromer dominated Egypt, 
not because England gave him force, or because Egypt loved 
us, or for any outside reason, but because he was so good 
aman. England has stacks of first-class men. The last 


354 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


thing you need out there is a genius. What is required is 
a tearing up of what we have done, and beginning again on 
advisory lines. It is no good patching with the present 
system. ‘Concessions to local feeling’ and such like rub- 
bish are only weakness-concessions, incentives to more 
violence. We are big enough to admit a fault, and turn a 
new page, and we ought to do it with a hoot of joy, because 
it will save us a million pounds a week. 


When in Arabia I would occasionally draw Law- 
rence into conversation about the statesmen and 
leaders of the day. He invariably had something 
amusing to tell about each. It was from him that I 
first learned that Mr. Lloyd George employed a bar- 
ber to visit No. 10 Downing Street daily to dress 
his famous head of hair. 

On another occasion I asked him to tell me some- 
thing about Lord Curzon, he replied: “In order to 
give you an idea what Lord Curzon is lke I must 
explain to you his outlook on life. Lord Curzon 
divides all the inhabitants of this earth into two 
groups, the masses and the classes. ‘The classes are 
Lord Curzon and the king. Everybody else belongs 
to the masses.” 

So while we were still at Covent Garden Opera- 
House, when I heard a story about Lawrence and 
his first meeting with the aloof and pompous marquis, 
I recalled what the colonel had said to me about his 
lordship in Arabia. 

Lawrence’s name was on every one’s lips at that 





LAWRENCE FLEES 355 


time, and the anecdote is a good one whether true or 
not. I will recount it as told to me: 

“Lord Curzon said to one of his satraps at the 
Foreign Office: ‘I say, who is this person, Lawrence? 
See that he is brought into our presence.’ Eventually 
another member of the cabinet unearthed the hero of 
Arabia and lured him to the Foreign Office. When 
ushered before the Great One, the latter waved his 
meek-looking and diminutive visitor into a chair and 
proceeded to deliver a lecture on the Near East to 
this young man who was an authority on the subject. 
Lawrence stood it as long as he could, and finally, 
unable to restrain himself longer, he said to the noble 
marquis: “But, my dear man, you don’t know what 
you are talking about!” 

Even while fighting in the desert Lawrence had 
foreseen the complications that were going to arise 
after the war was over; and, as noted before, in his 
advance on Damascus he was extremely anxious that 
Emir Feisal’s men should enter the city ahead of the 
British and French because he realized this would 
make it doubly difficult for the Allies to disregard 
their friends the Arabs when the tumult and shouting 
was over. 

Lord Winterton, who was with the Arab forces 
during the fighting around Damascus, in an article 
in “Blackwood’s Magazine,” pays an eloquent tribute 
to Lawrence and tells us how he was always thinking 
fai in advance of the problem of the moment. 


356 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


“IT am of the opinion,” writes the Earl, “that we 
owed much in those few days, before we finally ef- 
fected a junction with the British, to the good gen- 
eralship displayed by General Nuri, backed by L.’s 
advice and genius for thinking ahead of nine people 
out of ten.” Then in another place Lord Winterton 
adds: “He had no intention that the Arabs should 
take a back seat in the final destruction of the Turkish 
army. ‘There were political as well as military con- 
siderations at stake, as the Arabs knew well, and L. 
was only playing on a highly keyed-up instrument. 
L. infected us all with his enthusiasm, and I began 
to feel, despite my temperamental dislike of adven- 
ture qua adventure, that it would be monstrous, if 
when the Turkish fox came to be broken up, the 
British got the body, head, and brush, and the Arabs, 
who had helped to hunt him for three and a half 
years, only got a bit of the pad. If we were in at 
the military death of Turkey, ‘Brer Fox,’ it would 
make it the more difficult to refuse the Arabs a big 
share of the results—spoils, if you will—of the 
victory.” 

During his seven years’ wandering through the 
desert, dressing like an Arab, living with Arabs in 
their tents, observing their customs, talking to them 
in their own dialects, riding on his camel across a 
broad expanse of lonely country unbroken except by 
the long purple line of the horizon, lying down at 
night under a silent dome of stars, Thomas Edward 
Lawrence drank the cup of Arabian wisdom and ab- 


a al eed hn eel bettie ce ie te eb - 


ok ey. eee 


i i a i tre Se Sane 


LAWRENCE FLEES 357 


sorbed the spirit of the nomad peoples. No 
Westerner ever acquired greater influence over an 
Oriental people. He had united the scattered tribes 
of Arabia and induced chieftains who had been bitter 
enemies for generations to forget their feuds and 
fight side by side for the same cause. From remote 
parts of Arabia swarthy sons of the desert had 
swarmed to his standard as if he had been a new 
prophet. Largely by reason of his genius, Feisal 
and his followers had freed Arabia from Turkish op- 
pression. Lawrence had contributed new life and 
soul to the movement for Arabian independence. 
The far-reaching results of his spectacular and suc- 
cessful campaign were destined to play an important 
part in the final adjustment of Near Eastern affairs, 
and half-way measures made no more appeal to Col- 
onel Lawrence in time of peace than in time of 
war. 

In another of his communications to the press, 
when he was trying to mold public opinion in favor 
of the Arabs, we catch a further glimpse of his views. 

“The Arabs rebelled against the Turks,” said 
Lawrence in a letter to “The Times,” “not because 
the Turk Government was notably bad, but because 
they wanted independence. ‘They did not risk their 
lives in battle to change masters, to become British 
subjects or French citizens, but to win a show of 
their own. 

“Whether they are fit for imdependence or not 
yemains to be tried. Merit is no qualification for 


358 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


freedom. Bulgars, Afghans, and Tahitians have it. 
Fredom is enjoyed when you are so well armed, or so 
turbulent, or inhabit a country so thorny that the ex- 
pense of your neighbour’s occupying you is greater 
than the profit.” 

But Coionel Lawrence has no illusions as to the 
capacity of the Arabs for organization and admin- 
istration. He fully appreciates that these are not 
their strong points. But he has faith in them and be- 
lieves they have a message to give the West. 

“History is against the probability of the creation 
of an Arabic empire,” he once said to me in Arabia. 
“The Semitic mind does not lean toward system or 
organization. It is practically impossible to fuse the 
diverse elements among the Semites into a modern, 
closely knit state. On the other hand, the Semites 
have been more fertile in ideas than any other people. 
The Arabian movement has presented itself to me as 
the latest expression of the influence of the desert 
upon the settled peoples; the Semitic spirit has again 
exercised its influence over the Mediterranean basin. 
Emir Feisal is the last of the line of Semitic proph- 
ets. His campaign for Arabian independence, 
which made some five million converts among the 
Arabic-speaking peoples of the Near East, is by no 
means the least of those revelations by which the 
the Semites have so profoundly affected the Western 
world. 

“The Semites are represented by very little art, 
architecture, philosophy. There have been few Jew- 


AAS i oe eaten acca aa ies 





LAWRENCE FLEES 359 


ish artists or philosophers. But we find an amazing 
fertility among the Semites in the creation of creeds 
and religions. Three of these creeds—Judaism, 
Christianity and Mohammedanism—have become 
great world movements. The broken fragments of 
countless other religions which have failed are found 
to-day on the fringes of the desert. 

“The desert seems to produce only one idea, the 
universality of God. We who have gone out to dis- 
cover the meaning of the desert have found only 
emptiness; nothing but sand, wind, soil, and empty 
space. ‘The Bedouins leave behind them every ex- 
traneous comfort and go to live in the desert, in the 
very arms of starvation, that they may be free. The 
desert exacts a price for its secret. It makes the 
Bedouins entirely useless to their fellow-men. 
There has never been a Bedouin prophet. On the 
other hand, there has never been a Semitic prophet 
‘who has not, before preaching his message, gone into 
the desert and caught from the desert-dwellers a re- 
flection of their belief. The idea of the absolute 
worthlessness of the present world is a pure desert 
conception at the root of every Semitic religion, 
which must be filtered through the screen of a non- 
nomad prophet before it can be accepted by settled 
peoples.” 

With his exuberant imagination and his vista down 
the centuries, it was an easy matter for Lawrence to 
throw himself heart and soul into the Arabian move- 
ment. He remembered the time when the Axab 


360 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Empire controlled most of the Mediterranean world, 
when its philosophers, poets, and scientists enriched 
the culture of Europe. “There are some people who 
have dreams at night and wake to find them all rot. 
There are others who have dreams in the daytime, 
and occasionally they come true,” he said to me one 
day in London. It is Lawrence’s conviction that the 
Arabs still have something to give the world, some- 
thing that the world, particularly the materialistic 
Western world, sorely needs. It has been a for- 
tunate thing for the Arabs that he had the genius to 
make his dreams come true. 

I should like to use Lawrence’s own words in de- 
fining just what the Arabian movement means. 
“There is no reason to expect from the Arabian 
movement,” Lawrence told me, “any new develop- 
ment of law or economics. But Feisal has succeeded 
in restating forcibly the vital doctrine of the Semites, 
Other Worldliness; and his ideals will have a pro- 
found effect on the growing nationalist movements in 
Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Palestine, which 
are the present homes of Semitic political life. 

“Tt is like watching the waves of the Atlantic com- 
ing in and breaking themselves against the cliffs of 
the west coast of Ireland. To look at them you 
would say the cliffs were made of iron, and the waves 
quite futile. But when you study a map you 
see that the whole coast is torn open by the wearing 
of the sea, and you realize that it is only a matter of 
time before there will cease to be an Irish question. 


LAWRENCE FLEES 361 


In the same way the successive Semitic protests 
against the material world may seem simply so much 
waste effort, but some day the Semitic conviction of 
the other world may roll unchecked over the place 
where this world has been. 

“I rank Feisal’s movements as one more protest 
against the utter uselessness of material things. I 
was only trying to help roll up the wave, which came 
to its crest and toppled over when we took Damascus. 
It was just rolling up the Arabs in a tremendous ef- 
fort and joining the whole nation together in pursuit 
of an ideal object that had no practical shape or value. 
We were expressing our entire contempt for the 
material pursuits exalted PY. others, from are 
making to making statues.” 

Lawrence expresses the conviction that the Ara- 
bian movement is nothing more than a protest against 
outside interference. This time the protest has been 
directed against Turkey, but the next time it may be 
launched against France, Italy, Britain, or any 
Western nation that develops a tendency to be disre- 
gardful of another people’s deep-seated racial 
sentiments. 

“When you can understand the point of view of an- 
other race, you are a civilized being,” once remarked 
Lawrence to me in the desert. “I think that Eng- 
land (out of sheer conceit, and not because of any in- 
herent virtue in my countrymen) has been less guilty 
in its contacts than other nations. We do not wish 
other people to be like us, or to conform to our cus- 


362 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


toms, because we regard imitation of ourselves as 
blasphemous.” 

Later on, in Paris, Lawrence summed up for me 
the whole Near Eastern situation in a few words. 
He is of the opinion that France, in receiving the 
mandatory for Syria, is merely obtaining control of 
a temporary phase of the Arabian movement. 

“The Hedjaz will be absorbed in a few years by an 
Arabian state to the north of it. Damascus has al- 
ways been the center of Arabian self-determination, 
but Syria is a small country and too poor to look for- 
ward to a great agricultural or industrial future. It 
acts merely as a front door to Kurdistan, Armenia, 
and Mesopotamia. When Western enterprise re- 
stores Assyria and Babylonia to their former level of 
agricultural prosperity, and when advantage has been 
taken of the mineral wealth of Armenia and the cheap 
fuel of Mesopotamia, then the Arabian center will 
inevitably be transferred from Damascus eastward to 
Mosul, Bagdad, or some new capital. Mesopotamia 
has three times the irrigable area of Egypt. Egypt 
now has a population of more than thirteen millions, 
while there are only five millions in Mesopotamia. 
In the near future Mesopotamia will increase to forty 
millions, and Syria, which now has a population of 
three million five hundred thousand, will have per- 
haps five million. This is rather a bad outlook for 
Syria. But no matter where the center of Arabian 
gravity may shift, nothing can change the Arabian 
Desert and the ideals of its people.” 


LAWRENCE FLEES 363 


Despite Lawrence’s desire to live in retirement, 
with only his books for his companions, his country- 
men would not listen to it. When Winston Churchill 
took up the cabinet post of colonial secretary, one of 
the first things he did was to force Lawrence to come 
and help the Government straighten out the Near 
East tangle. He appointed Lawrence adviser on 
Near Eastern affairs, and the latter reluctantly 
agreed to remain at the Colonial Office for just one 
year. During this time the Mesopotamian problem 
was solved along the lines that Lawrence had origi- 
nally suggested, and Emir Feisal was called to Bag- 
dad and made king of Iraq, the modern successor to 
the great Calif Harun al Rashid of Arabian Nights 
fame. Thus Feisal, despite the fact that he had lost 
the throne of Syria, became the founder of a new 
Mesopotamian dynasty and the ruler of a far more 
important state. 


CHAPTER XXXTI 


THE SECRET OF LAWRENCE’S SUCCESS 


MONG the hundreds of questions that I have 
A been asked about Colonel Lawrence by press 
and public in every part of the world, some 
of the most frequent have been: What was the secret 
of Lawrence’s success, and how could a Christian and 
a Kuropean gain such influence over fanatical Mo- 
hammedans? What reward has Lawrence received? 
Is he going to write a book? Where is he now, how 
does he earn his living, and what is going to become of 
him? What are his hobbies? Will he ever marry? 
Is he a normal human being and has he a sense of 
humor? 

Of course there have been a host of factors that 
have contributed to his success, that gained him his 
influence, and that enabled him to win not only the 
respect of the Arabs but their admiration and their 
devotion as well. They respected him partly because, 
although a mere youth, he seemed to have more wis- 
dom than their wise men. ‘They admired him partly 
because of his personal prowess, his ability to outdo 
them at the things in which they excel, such as camel- 


riding and shooting, and also because of his courage 
364 


A ae ee oe em 


LAWRENCE’S SUCCESS 365 


and modesty. He usually led them in battle, and 
under fire he was courageous to a fault. Wounded 
a number of times, his injuries, fortunately, were 
never serious enough to keep him out of action. 
Often he was too far from a base to get medical 
attention, so that his wounds were obliged to heal 
themselves. The Arabs became devoted to him be- 
cause he gained them victories and then tactfully gave 
all the credit to his companions. That he was a 
Christian they considered unfortunate, and they de- 
cided that it was an accident and in some mysterious 
way ‘the will of Allah,” but some of them regarded 
him as one sent from heaven by their Prophet to help 
free them from the Turks. 

West and East fraternize politely, if rather in- 
harmoniously, in the more accessible towns of Arabia 
and Syria, for the West has money to spend and the 
East is avaricious. But away in the desert and wild 
places it is otherwise. 'The nomads, whose ancestors 
have roamed the country for four thousand years and 
more, resist the inquisitive eyes and hungry note- 
books of foreigners who are not proved friends. 
They still regard stray Europeans with hostile sus- 
picion and as fair subjects for loot. But Lawrence’s 
minute knowledge of their intricate customs, and his 
apparent complete mastery of the Koran and com- 
plex Mohammedan law, caused them to regard him 
with a tolerance and respect which are exceedingly 
rare among the fanatical peoples of the Near East. 
And of course his knowledge of their customs 


366 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


and laws was of incalculable importance in enabl- 
ing him to settle disputes between antagonistic fac- 
tions. 

To gain his ends it was necessary for Lawrence to 
be a consummate actor. He was obliged completely 
to submerge his European mode of living, even at the 
risk of winning the criticism and ridicule of his own 
countrymen, by appearing in cities like Cairo, where 
East and West meet, garbed as an Oriental. His 
critics scoffed and said that he did this merely to gain 
notoriety. But there was a far deeper reason. Law- 
rence knew that he was being watched constantly 
by shereefs, sheiks, and tribesmen, and he knew that 
they would regard it as a very great compliment to 
them if he went about, even among his own people, 
dressed in the costume of the desert. 

During those first days which I had spent with 
Lawrence in Jerusalem he wore nothing but Bedouin 
garb. Nor did he ever appear to be aware of the 
curiosity excited by his costume in the streets of the 
Holy City, for he always gave one the impression 
that he was engrossed in his own thoughts hundreds of 
miles or hundreds of centuries away. And usually 
on the occasion when he visited Palestine and Egypt 
in Arab kit, he was obliged to go direct to Ramleh or 
Cairo from one of his expeditions across the desert. 
He was therefore obliged to turn up at headquarters 
just as he happened to be dressed for his work, with- 
out wasting the valuable days which would have been 
required for him to return all the way south to the 


LAWRENCE’S SUCCESS 367 


base-camp at Akaba for a uniform, just to satisfy 
his critics. 

When in the desert he never wore anything but 
Arab garb, nor could he have succeeded in the amaz- 
ing way that he did had he offended the Arabs by 
wearing Kuropean costume. When off “in the blue” 
on his she-dromedary, it was not feasible for Law- 
rence to take a wardrobe along in his camel-bags. 
The speed with which he trekked obliged him to 
travel light. In fact, he usually carried nothing but 
a lump of unleavened bread, a bit of chocolate, his 
canteen, chlorine tablets, a tooth-brush, a rifle, re- 
volver and ammunition, and his little volume of 
the satires of Aristophanes in the original. 

The rifle which he carried through the whole cam- 
paign had a colorful history. Just one of the ordi- 
nary British Army variety, the Turks had captured 
it at the Dardanelles, and Enver Pasha had adorned 
it with a metal plate worked with gold and carrying 
the inscription, “To Feisal, with Enver’s regards.” 
Enver had given it to Emir Feisal early in 1916, 
before the outbreak of the Shereefian Revolution, in 
order to prove to Feisal that the Turks had already 
won the war. Later the Emir gave it to Lawrence, 
and the latter carried it on all his raids. For every 
Turk he killed he cut a notch, a big one for an officer 
and a little one for a soldier. The rifle is now in the 
possession of King George. 

Occasionally when he went to Cairo or to Jerusalem 
to make a report to General Allenby, he wore the 


368 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


uniform of a British officer, but even after he had 
attained the rank of colonel he preferred the uniform 
of a second leutenant, usually without insignia of 
any kind. I have seen him in the streets of Cairo 
without a belt and with unpolished boots—negligence 
next to high treason in the British army! To my 
knowledge he was the only British officer in the war 
who so completely disregarded all the little precisions 
and military formalities for which Tommy Atkins 
and his “hofficers” are world famous. Lawrence 
rarely saluted, and when he did it was simply with a 
wave of the hand, as though he were saying, “Hulloa, 
old man,” toa pal. He rarely saluted any one senior 
to him, although he always made it a point to ac- 
knowledge salutes from men in the ranks. As for 
military titles, he abhorred them, and from general ta 
private he was known as plain “Lawrence.” Several 
times in the desert he told me how thoroughly he 
disliked the red tape of the army and said that as 
soon as the war was over he intended to go back to 
archeology. 

He was no parlor conversationalist. Lawrence 
rarely said anything to any one unless it was neces- 
sary to give instructions or ask advice or answer a 
direct question. Even in the heat of the Arabian 
campaign he sought solitude. Frequently I found 
him in his tent reading an archeological quarterly 
when the rest of the camp was worked up to fever- 
pitch over a plan of attack. He was so shy that 
when General Sir Gilbert Clayton, the distinguished 


® 


LAWRENCE’S SUCCESS 369 


commander of the Secret Corps, or some other officer 
sought to compliment him on one of his exploits, he 
would get red as a school-girl and look down at his 
feet. 

Several years ago, in Calcutta, Colonel Robert 
Lorraine, the eminent actor-airman, said to me, “But 
if Lawrence is so extremely modest and shy, why did 
he pose for so many photographs for you?” A keen 
question and a natural one. And out of justice to 
Lawrence I think I ought to answer it, even at the 
expense of disclosing a professional secret. My 
cameraman, Mr. Chase, uses a high-speed camera. 
We saw considerable of Colonel Lawrence in Arabia, 
and although he arranged for us to get both “still” 
and motion pictures of Emir Feisal, Auda Abu Tayi, 
and the other Arab leaders, he would turn away when 
he saw the lens pointing in his direction. We got 
more pictures of the back of his kuffieh than of his 
face. But after much strategy and after using all 
the artifices that I had learned as a reporter on a 
Chicago newspaper, where it was worth one’s job to 
fail to bring back a photograph of the fair lady in- 
volved in the latest scandal, I finally manceuvered 
Lawrence into allowing Chase to take a “sitting shot” 
on two different occasions. Then while I kept 
Colonel Lawrence’s attention away from Mr. Chase 
by keeping up a rapid fire of questions regarding our 
projected trip to the “lost city” of Petra, which he 
believed to be the primary object of our visit to 
Arabia, Mr. Chase hurriedly took a dozen pictures 


370 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


from as many different angles, and in less time than 
it usually requires for a fussy studio photogragher 
to set up and expose two plates. Any one familiar 
with the methods of newspaper photographers will 
appreciate the simplicity of this where you are work- 
ing out of doors in good light. If you’ve got a 
graphlex and don’t get stricken with buck-fever at 
the critical moment, you can get photographs of St. 
Vitus himself. I realized that Lawrence was one 
of the most romantic figures of the war. I knew that 
we had a great scoop. And I had made up my mind 
that we would not leave Arabia until we had the 
photographs we wanted. Frequently Chase snapped 
pictures of the colonel without his knowledge, or just 
at the instant that he turned and found himself facing 
the lens and discovered our perfidy. When two ex- 
perienced hunters start out for game, one to act as 
decoy and the other to do the shooting, the poor victim 
has about as much chance as the Bengal tiger who has 
been selected as the target for visiting royalty. 
But to get back to the topic of how Lawrence 
succeeded in obtaining such a wonderful hold over 
the Arabs by dressing like them and mastering the 
smallest details of their daily life, by his courage, 
his modesty, his physical prowess and his mature wis- 
dom, there can hardly be any question that the way in 
which this youth gained the confidence, not only of 
the more cosmopolitan descendants of the Prophet 
who rule over the cities of Holy Arabia, but also of 
the Bedouin tribes of the desert, will be regarded by 


LAWRENCE’S SUCCESS 371 


historians of the future as one of the most amazing 
personal achievements of this age. 

_ The phenomenal character of his accomplishment 
can be more accurately appraised if we keep in mind 
that for thirteen hundred years, since the days of 
Mohammed, fewer Europeans have explored Holy 
Arabia than have penetrated mysterious Tibet or 
Central Africa. The zealous Mohammedans who live 
around the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina prevent 
Christians, Jews, and other non-Mohammedans from 
profaning holy soil, and the wunbeliever who 
ventures into this part of Arabia is indeed lucky 
if he returns alive. So Lawrence’s achievements 
seem all the more extraordinary when we remember 
that he admitted openly that he was a Christian. 
For even though he did wear the robes and accoutre- 
ments of a shereef of Mecca, he only actually posed 
as an Oriental when he slipped through the Turkish 
lines wearing the veil of a native woman. 

Of course the vast wealth which he had at his dis- 
posal, the seemingly inexhaustible supply of gold 
sovereigns with which he paid his army, was of vast 
importance. But though the Germans and Turks 
also tried using gold, their weakness lay in the 
fact that they “had no Lawrence,” declares H. St. 
John Philby, the Arabian authority, who represented 
Britain in the Central Arabian Desert ruled over by 
Ibn Sa’ud. 

Colonel Lawrence played the part of a man of 
mystery endowed with the ability to do everything 


372 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


superlatively well, outvying the Arabs at everything 
from statecraft to camel-riding, and even to using 
delicate shadings of their own language. In fact, 
language seems easy for him. In addition to his 
mother-tongue, he speaks French, Italian, Spanish, 
and German, some Dutch, Norwegian, and Hindu- 
stani, is a master of ancient Latin and Greek, and 
can manipulate many of the Arabic dialects of the 
Near East. 

Lawrence was exceedingly careful never to enter 
into competition with the Bedouins unless he was 
quite certain of excelling them. He also gained a 
reputation as a man of deeds rather than words, 
which greatly impressed the desert-dwellers, who for 
the most part chatter as incessantly as the crows of 
India. When he did speak he had something of im- 
portance to say and knew whereof he spoke. He 
seldom made errors, and when he did he took care 
that the Arabs should ultimately regard it as a suc- 
cess. He was an indefatigable worker even under 
conditions of ever-insistent hospitality, and he would 
work far into the night when his Arab colleagues 
were asleep. It was late at night, or while trekking 
across the desert swaying in the camel-saddle, that he 
would plan his far-reaching policies of diplomacy and 
strategy. Small and wiry, he seemed made of steel. 
But the desert war left its indelible mark on him in 
more ways than one, for one of his brothers confided 
to me that ever since his return from Arabia he has 
suffered from severe heart-strain. 


LAWRENCE’S SUCCESS 373 


Auda Abu Tayi, always sincere in his Judgment 
of people, once said to me: “I have never seen any 
one with such a capacity for work, and he is one of 
the finest camel-riders that ever trekked across the 
desert.”” A Bedouin can pay no finer compliment. 
Then added Auda, “By the beard of the spa he 


seems more than a man!’ 


CHAPTER XXXII 
THE ART OF HANDLING ARABS 


( Att, a LAWRENCE believed in the 
Arabs, and the Arabs believed in him, but 
they would never have trusted him so im- 

plicitly had he not been such a complete master of 

their customs and all the superficial external features 
of Arabian life. I once asked him, when we were 
trekking across the desert, what he considered the 
best way of dealing with the wild nomad peoples of 
this part of the world. My motive was to try to 
get him to tell in his own words something about 
the methods that had enabled him to accomplish what 
no other man could. I am confident that he thought 
I wanted the information merely for my own im- 
mediate use in dealing with the Bedouins with whom 
we were living. Had he suspected that I was at- 
tempting to make him talk about himself, he would 
have turned the conversation into other channels. 
“The handling of Arabs might be termed an art, 
not a science, with many exceptions and no obvious 
rules,” was his answer. ‘The Arab forms his judg- 
ment on externals that we ignore, and so it is vitally 
important that a stranger should watch every move- 


ment he makes and every word he says during his 
374 


ART OF HANDLING ARABS 375 


first weeks of association with a tribe. Nowhere in 
the world is it so difficult to atone for a bad start 
as with the Bedouins. However, if you once succeed 
in reaching the inner circle of a tribe and actually 
gain their confidence, you can do pretty much as 
you please with them and at the same time do many 
things yourself that would have caused them to re- 
gard you as an outcast had you been too forward at 
the start. The beginning and end of the secret of 
handling Arabs is an unremitting study of them. 
Always keep on your guard; never speak an unne- 
cessary word; watch yourself and your companions 
constantly; hear all that passes; search out what is 
going on beneath the surface; read the characters 
of Arabs; discover their tastes and weaknesses, and 
keep everything you find out to yourself. Bury 
yourself in Arab circles; have no ideas and no in- 
terests except the work in hand, so that you master 
your part thoroughly enough to avoid any of the 
little slips that would counteract the painful work of 
weeks. Your success will be in proportion to your 
mental effort.” 

To illustrate the importance the Bedouins place on 
externals, Lawrence told me that on one occasion a 
British officer went up country; and the first night, 
as the guest of a Howeitat sheik, he sat down on the 
guest rug of honor with his feet stretched out in front 
of him instead of tucked under him in Arab fashion. 
That officer was never popular with the Howeitat. 
To the Bedouin it is as offensive to display the pedal 


376 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


extremities ostentatiously as it would be for us to 
put our feet on the table at a dinner-party. A short 
distance behind us in the caravan rode a chief of the 
Shammar Arabs who had a great scar across his 
face. Lawrence related this story: | 

“While that fellow was dining with Ibn Rashid, 
the ruler of North Central Arabia, he happened to 
choke. He felt so much humiliated that he jerked 
out his knife and slit his mouth right up to the caro- 
tid artery in his cheek, merely to show his host that 
a bit of meat had actually stuck in his back teeth.” 

The Arabs consider it a sign of very bad breeding 
for a man to choke over his food. Not only does 
it show that he is greedy, but it is believed that the 
devil has caught him. Other fine points of etiquette 
are bound up in the fact that the Bedouins never use 
forks and knives, but simply reach into the various 
dishes on the table with their hands. For instance, 
it is extremely bad form for any one to eat with his 
left hand. 

The dyed-in-the-wool nomad of Arabia never 
makes allowances for any ignorance of desert customs 
in forming his judgment of a stranger. If you have 
not mastered desert etiquette, you are regarded as 
an alien and perhaps hostile outsider. Lawrence’s 
understanding of the Arabs and his unfailing ability 
to do the right thing at the right moment was un- 
canny. Of course, he could not have lived as an 
Arab in Arabia if he had not learned the family his- 
tory of all the prominent peoples of the desert, in- 


ART OF HANDLING ARABS 377 


cluding the complete list of their friends and enemies. 
He was expected to know that a certain man’s father 
had been hanged or that his mother was the divorced 
wife of some famous chieftain. It would be as awk- 
ward to inquire about an Arab’s father if he had 
been a famous fighter as it would be to introduce a 
divorced woman to her former husband. If Law- 
rence desired any information he gained it by indirect 
means and by cleverly leading the conversation 
around to the subject in which he was interested; he 
never asked questions. Fortunately for the Arab 
Nationalist movement and for the Allies, Lawrence 
had got beyond the stage of making mistakes before 
the war and at one time was actually a sheik of a 
tribe in Mesopotamia. 

“It is vitally important for any one dealing with 
the desert peoples to speak their local dialects, not 
the Arabic current in some other part of the East,” 
declared Lawrence. “The safest plan is to be rather 
formal at first, to avoid getting too deeply involved 
in conversation.” Nearly all the officers sent to 
codperate with the Arabs in the revolt spoke the 
Egyptian-Arabic dialect. The Arabs despise the 
Egyptians, whom they regard as poor relations 
Therefore, most of the Europeans sent by the Allies 
to codperate with the Hedjaz people found them- 
selves coldly treated. The Allies succeeded in win- 
ning the Arabs to their cause because Lawrence was 
able to crystallize the Arabian idea of winning in- 
dependence from the Turks into a definite form 


378 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


and because he had attained the unusual distinction 
of being taken into the bosom of most of their 
tribes. 

It was Colonel Lawrence who was mainly respon- 
sible for the permanent elevation of Hussein, Feisal, 
and Abdullah to their respective thrones. Lawrence 
believed that the best way to consolidate the desert 
peoples and wipe out their terrible blood-feuds would 
be to create an Arabian aristocracy. Nothing of this 
kind had ever existed in Arabia before, because the 
nomads of the Near East are the freest people on 
earth and refuse to recognize any authority higher 
than themselves. But all Arabs have for centuries 
accorded a little extra respect to the direct descend- 
ants of the founder of their religion. Lawrence, in 
his attempt to persuade the Arabs to recognize 
shereefs as specially chosen people, cleverly took ad- 
vantage of the fact that the family tree of Hussein 
towered higher, in fact, than a eucalyptus—right up 
to the Prophet himself. But I am sure he would 
never have been able to accomplish this if he had not 
received the unlimited financial support of the British 
Government. A stream of several hundred thou- 
sand pounds in glittering golden sovereigns was 
poured into Arabia each month to enable the young 
archeologist to pay King Hussein’s Arabian army. 
Lawrence had practically unlimited credit. He 
could draw any amount he desired up to a million 
pounds or so. But gold alone would not have suf- 
ficed, for the Turks and Germans had tried its lure 


Cg rs ot tp 


erie 


ART OF HANDLING ARABS 379 


and failed. ‘The Arabs hated the Turks even more 
than they loved gold. 

Since the beginning of time the sheiks or patriarchs 
of one tribe have had absolutely no influence with 
members of other tribes. Shereefs, who really do 
not belong to any tribe, were recognized as superior 
leaders only by the people of Mecca, Medina, and 
the larger towns. ‘The word “‘shereef” or “shrf,” as 
it is spelled in Arabic (a language without vowels), 
signified “honor.” A shereef is supposed to be a 
man who displays honor. In the holy cities of 
Mecca and Medina, Shereef Hussein and Shereef 
Feisal had long stood high in the esteem of the in- 
habitants, who were accustomed to refer to them as 
“Sidr” or “Lord.” The care-free Bedouins, unlike 
their city cousins, merely addressed them as “Hus- 
sein” and “Feisal’’ without bothering about titles. 
But Lawrence, with his usual powers of persuasion, 
convinced even the Bedouins that they should adopt 
the term “Sidi” in referring to all shereefs. So suc- 
cessful was he that within a few months, in spite of 
the fact that he was a foreigner and a Christian, they 
honored even Lawrence with this title because of 
their deep and genuine admiration for him. 

Lieutenant Colonel C. E. Vickery, C.M.G., 
D.S.O., etc., another able officer of the regular army 
who played a prominent part in the campaign and 
afterward acted as British agent at Jeddah, gives us 
a vivid glimpse into the formality of a shereef’s daily 
life. Colonel Vickery is one of the few Europeans 


380 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


who have ever visited Taif, the summer capital of 
the Hedjaz, a city that is not nearly so sacred as 
Mecca or Medina, but nevertheless a place about 
which the outside world knows nothing. 

“It was quite dark when we arrived, very cold 
and stiff,” relates Colonel Vickery. “We were asked 
into the guest-chamber—a fine apartment, its floors 
covered with priceless Persian carpets, and round 
the walls cushions and pillows. Courteously our 
host turned to us and, embracing us on each cheek, 
prayed Allah to bless us and murmured the grace- 
ful compliment that we were now in our own home. 
For an hour we sat in that room drinking coffee and 
highly sugared tea and smoking, while we watched 
an Eastern scene that centuries have not changed. 
The shereef had only been absent a day, but such is 
the etiquette of the East that it behooved all to pay 
their respects to him on his safe return from a jour- 
ney. To the threshold of the door from time to 
time came relatives, friends, and slaves. ‘All re- 
moved their slippers and entered the room—the door 
Was open—according to their station. The slaves 
came in quickly bent with due humility, and hastily 
kissed the two fingers extended to them and as hast- 
ily withdrew. Dependents entered more leisurely 
and kissed the back of the shereef’s hand. ‘Turning 
it over, they then kissed the part between the first 
finger and thumb and withdrew quietly. 

“Friends came in, and for these the shereef rose, 
showed a faint reluctance at having his hand kissed, 


ART OF HANDLING ARABS — 381 


and embraced them on one cheek with murmured 
salutations. For his relatives he rose, allowed his 
hand to be kissed with seeming reluctance, and then 
saluted them warmly on each cheek, straining them 
to his breast and murmuring many and heartfelt 
wishes for, their long life and happiness.” 

The special deference paid to shereefs by the 
townsmen and villagers, in particular, had long ago 
developed in the city Arabs a sense of their own 
superior responsibility and honor. ‘That, of course, 
was of great assistance to Lawrence in creating his 
Arabian aristocracy. In fact, it was by the saga- 
cious use of this personal responsibility that Law- 
rence and his associates were able to unify the rival 
tribes and develop men capable of acting as subordi- 
nate leaders under King Hussein, Prince Feisal, and 
his brothers. In order to carry out his plans for 
widening the influence of the shereefs and making 
Hussein the recognized ruler of the Hedjaz, Law- 
rence had first to win the confidence of all the rival 
tribes. Then, quietly, in such a manner as to make 
them think the idea entirely their own, he induced 
them to forget past tribal differences and unite under 
the leadership of Hussein and his sons and the other 
shereefs, in order to drive out the hated Turk in the 
hope of helping bring the war to a victorious con- 
clusion for the Allies, and in the hope of restoring 
the califate and the former splendor of their an- 
cient empire. 

‘King Hussein had to rely entirely on tribal loyalty 


382 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


for his military strength. His personal Bedouin 
following was drawn principally from two of the 
most numerous tribes of the desert, the Harb and the 
Ateibah, together with one tribe of inferior rank, the 
Juheinah. These three tribes occupy a great block 
of territory embracing three quarters of the Hedjaz 
and a strip of western Nejd. South and west of 
this block, but within the limits of the Hedjaz, dwell 
half a dozen small tribes, the Hudheil, Beni, Saad, 
Buqum, Muteir, Thaqif, and Juhadlah. Still fur- 
ther south is a group of powerful tribes, the Dhaur, 
Hasan, Ghamid, Zahran, and Shahran, whose adhe- 
sion meant the favorable disposal of stouter fighting 
material than the Hedjaz itself could supply. All 
of them sent contingents to assist King Hussein. 
From the country north of the central group he drew 
reinforcements from three of the smaller Anazeh 
tribes. ‘The Billi, immediately north of the Juhei- 
nah, enrolled to a man, and they were followed by 
the Atiyah and Howeitat. The great Howeitat 
tribe, which roams the country between the head of 
the Gulf of Akaba and the lower end of the Dead 
Sea and Central Arabia, has more enemies, causes 
more trouble, and takes part in more blood-feuds 
than any other group of tent-dwellers. One can 
meet no more obstinate, unruly, and quarrelsome 
people. They seem to have no fear. 'The Howeitats 
find it impossible to unite even among themselves 
when attacked from without. About the only thing 
they possess in common are wounds and the same 


ART OF HANDLING ARABS 383 


tribal marks on their camels. This great tribe has 
two subdivisions, the Ibn Jazi and the Abu Tayi, of 
which old Audu Abu Tayi, the Bedouin Robin Hood, 
is the chieftain. But Auda is chieftain only by virtue 
of his daring and prowess, for no man in that spirited 
group cares to bow down before the authority of 
any sheik. For fifteen years the two sections of the 
Howeitat waged relentless war upon each other until 
the mild-voiced Shereef Lawrence succeeded in get- 
ting them both to unite with Hussein and Feisal to 
drive out the Turks. But even then Lawrence found 
it advisable to keep the two sections attached to dif- 
ferent parts of his army so that they could not leap 
at each other’s throats. ‘Both were willing to obey 
Lawrence’s orders so long as they were kept apart, 
but in the event of their meeting they regarded them- 
selves in honor bound to start a row. Audu Abu 
Tayi and his people consider the Druses, who wage 
the most merciless war in the desert, among their 
most bitter blood-enemies, and Lawrence more than 
had his hands full to prevent them from killing each’ 
other instead of the Turks. In 1912, fifty of Auda’s 
fighting men, mounted on camels, captured eighty 
Druse cavalrymen in battle. This is striking evi- 
dence of the fighting ability of the Howeitat war- 
riors, because one horseman is usually worth two 
camelmen in a fight, because of the fact a horse can 
be manceuvered so much more rapidly. Since that 
engagement the Druses have been continually on the 
alert, hoping to take the Howeitat by surprise and 


884. WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


annihilate them. In spite of these minor insurgen- 
cies, the Howeitat, under Auda’s leadership, became 
the finest fighting force in Western Arabia, regarded 
by Colonel Lawrence as the backbone of his wild 
desert army. 

Perhaps train-wrecking was Lawrence’s most spec- 
tacular pastime, but nothing he did was more signifi- 
cant or remarkable than this consolidation of the 
Arab tribes. With them, raiding hostile neighbors 
was both their amusement and their business. To 
invite two enemy chieftans into Emir Feisal’s tent to 
swear friendship and loyalty over the ghosts of stolen 
horses and camels was like asking a Wall Street 
Magnate to turn over his fortune to Communists. 

In order to illustrate the delicacy of the problem 
that Lawrence manipulated, let me cite a particular 
instance. In June, 1917, we were attending a con- 
ference in the courtyard of Emir Feisal’s palace at 
Akaba, a one-story structure resembling, with its ex- 
tensive interior courtyard, a Spanish hacienda. ‘The 
palace is situated in the little town back of a fringe 
of waving palm-trees, the only green splash of color 
in this stretch of sand, where once was located the 
great seaport of King Solomon. In a circle around 
the emir were seated thirty shereefs and sheiks, all 
heads of prominent tribes, and among them six sheiks 
of the Ibn Jazi Howeitat. All of a sudden I saw a 
swift change come over the unusually impassive 
countenance of the young Englishman. Jumping to 
his feet, Lawrence slipped noiselessly to the door- 


ART OF HANDLING ARABS — 885 


way of the courtyard. I saw him speak to a group 
of Arabs who were about to enter and then lead them 
off in another direction. Later, when I asked him 
the reason for his speedy exit, he informed me that 
the warriors at the entrance were none other than the 
renowned Auda, his cousin, Mohammed, and some of 
the other leading fighting men of the Abu Tayi. He 
added that if Auda and his companions had come on 
through into the palace courtyard, a bloody battle 
might have been fought right in front of Emir Feisal, 
possibly resulting in the total disruption of the 
Arabian forces. 

Until he became an undisputed leader, Lawrence 
kept in constant touch with the king of the Hedjaz 
and his four sons, principally Emir Feisal. He lived 
with the leaders that he might be with them wher 
they were dining or holding audiences in their tents. 
It was his theory that giving direct and formal ad- 
vice was not nearly so effective as the constant drop- 
ping of ideas in casual talk. At his meals the Arab 
is off guard and at his ease, engaging in small talk 
and general conversation. Whenever Lawrence 
wanted to make a new move, start a raid, or capture 
a town, he would bring up the question casually and 
indirectly, and before half an hour had passed he 
usually succeeded in inspiring one of the prominent 
sheiks to suggest the plan. Lawrence would then 
seize his advantage, and before the sheik’s enthusiasm 
had time to wane he would push him on to the execu- 
tion of the plan. 


386 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


On one occasion Lawrence was dining with Emir 
Feisal and some of his leaders, not far from Akaba. 
The Arab chieftains thought it would be a splendid 
plan to take Deraa, the important railway junction 
hundreds of miles farther north, just south of 
Damascus. Lawrence knew that Deraa could be 
captured, but he also realized that at that stage of 
the campaign it could not be held for any length of 
time; so he said: “Qh, yes, that’s a fine idea! But 
first, let’s work out the details.” A great council 
of war was held, but somehow the longer the matter 
was discussed the less enthusiasm manifested itself. 
In fact, the Arab leaders became so disheartened 
that they even suggested retreating from the position 
that they occupied at that moment. Then Lawrence 
delicately suggested that such a retreat would greatly 
anger King Hussein, and little by little he prevailed 
upon them to go through with the original plan for 
capturing Akaba, which was his first objective. 

As Lawrence once remarked to me under his 
breath when we were attending a consultation of 
Arab leaders: “Everybody is a general in the Arab 
army. In British circles a general is allowed to 
make a mess of things by himself, whereas here in 
Arabia every man wants a hand in making the mess 
complete.” 

The Arab Shereefs and sheiks are strong-minded 
and obstinate men. Nothing hurts them more than 
to have some one point out their mistakes. If you 
say “rubbish” to an Arab, it is sure to put his back 


a 


ART OF HANDLING ARABS _— 887 


up, and he will ever afterward decline to help you. 
Lawrence never refused to consider any scheme that 
was put forward, even though he had the actual 
power todo so. Instead, he always approved a plan 
and then skilfully directed the conversation so that 
the Arab himself modified it to suit Lawrence, who 
would then announce it publicly to the other Arab 
leaders before the originator of the scheme had time 
to change his point of view. All this would be 
manipulated in such a delicate way that the Arab 
would not for a moment be aware that he was acting 
under pressure. If Lawrence and his British asso- 
ciates had acted behind the shereef’s back they might 
have attained certain of their objectives in half the 
time, but until Lawrence actually had been raised 
to supreme command by the voluntary act of the 
Arabs themselves and was regarded by them as a 
sort of superman he was wise enough never to give 
direct orders. Even his suggestions and advice to 
Emir Feisal he reserved until they were alone. 
From the beginning of the campaign Lawrence 
adopted the policy of trying not to do too much him- 
self, always remembering that it was the Arab’s war. 
‘At times, when it seemed necessary, he would even 
strengthen the prestige of the Arab leaders with their 
subordinates at the expense of his own position. 
The failure of the Turks and Germans, on the other 
hand, was partly due to the fact that they rushed 
at the Arabs blindly and attempted to deal with them 
in a brutally direct manner. 


888 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Whenever a new shereef or sheik came for the 
first time to offer his services to King Hussein, 
Lawrence and any other British officer present made 
it a point to leave the emir’s tent until the formality 
of swearing allegiance on the Koran and touching 
Feisal’s hand was over. They did this because the 
strange sheik might easily become suspicious if his 
first impression revealed foreigners in Feisal’s con-+ 


fidence. At the same time it was Lawrence’s policy ~ 


always to have his name associated with those of the 
shereefs. Eiverywhere he went he was regarded as 
Feisal’s mouthpiece. “Wave a shereef in front of 
you like a banner and hide your own mind and 
person,” was the maxim of this student of Bedouin 
tactics. But Lawrence was careful not to identify 
himself too long or too often with any one tribal sheik, 
for he did not want to lose prestige by being asso- 
ciated with any particular tribe and its inevitable 
feuds. The Bedouins are extremely jealous. When 
going on an expedition Lawrence would ride with 
every one up and down the line, so that no one could 
criticize him for showing favoritism. 

In every way Lawrence used his knowledge of 
desert psychology to the best possible advantage. 
For instance, he was constantly in need of detailed 
information regarding the topography of the country 
over which the Arabian forces were campaigning; 
but the Bedouins are always reluctant to reveal the 
location of wells, springs, and points of vantage. 
Lawrence convinced them that making maps was an 


ee 


ART OF HANDLING ARABS _ 389 


accomplishment of every educated man. Auda Abu 
Tayi and many of the other sheiks became so keenly 
interested in maps that they often kept Lawrence 
up to all hours of the night helping them with maps 
that were not of the slightest military value and in 
which he was not in the least interested. 


CHAPTER XXXIII 


LAWRENCE THE MAN 


LTHOUGH he had been cited for nearly 

A every decoration that the British and French 

Governments had to offer, Lawrence sedu- 

lously ran away from them by camel, aéroplane, or 
any available method of swift transportation. 

The French Government sent word to its con- 
tingent in Arabia to bestow upon the dashing colonel 
the Croix de Guerre with palms. Captain Pisani, 
commandant of the French force at Akaba, was anx- 
ious to make the ceremony an impressive affair. He 
wanted to have all of the British, French, and Arab 
troops out on parade so that he could deliver an 
appropriate eulogistic address, present the decoration 
to Lawrence, and then kiss him on both cheeks. But 
Lawrence heard of the plan and vanished into the 
desert. Several times he gave the persistent Pisani 
the slip. In despair the commandant went to Major 
Marshall, Lawrence’s tent-mate, who advised him to 
surround the mess-tent some morning when Law- 
rence happened to be in Akaba and take him by 
surprise. So Pisani and his detachment waited until 
he returned; then turned up in full regalia, sur- 


rounded him just as he had reached the marmalade 
390 


LAWRENCE THE MAN 391 


course, and read an impressive document relating how 
he had gone for days without food or water and how 
he had outwitted and defeated the Turks. 

At the end of the campaign, when Lawrence re- 
turned to Europe and left Marshall behind in Arabia, 
the colonel wrote asking his tent-mate to ship his 
things from Akaba to Cairo. Lawrence neither 
drank nor smoked but was inordinately fond of choc- 
olate, and there were dozens of empty tins piled in 
the corner of his tent, together with books, bits of 
theodolites, a camel-saddle, cartridge-drums, and odds 
and ends from machine-guns. In one of the empty 
chocolate-tins the major found the French decoration 
which Pisani had presented. He put it in his own 
bag, and when Lawrence came to meet Emir Feisal 
and the Arab delegates at Marseilles, Major Marshall 
“pulled his leg” by making another speech reminding 
the colonel of his splendid work for France, and then 
represented him with the Croix de Guerre with palms. 

When the Duke of Connaught visited Palestine to 
confer the Grand Cross of the Order of the Knights 
of St. John of Jerusalem on General Allenby, he 
intended to present a decoration to Lawrence as 
well. The young leader of the Arabian forces hap- 
pened at the time to be out “in the blue,” busily 
blowing up Turkish trains. Aéroplanes were sent 
to scour the desert for him. Messages were dropped 
on various Arab camps requesting any one who saw 
Shereef Lawrence to tell him to report to Jerusalem. 
One fine day Lawrence came strolling in on foot 


3922 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


through the Turkish lines, to show his indifference 
of the enemy. In the meantime the ceremony in 
Jerusalem had already taken place, and the Duke of 
Connaught had gone to Egypt. Knowing Law- 
rence’s peculiar aversion to the acceptance of medals 
or military honors of any kind, his associates of the 
intelligence staff succeeded in seducing him to Cairo 
only by inventing some other plausible pretext. 
Upon his arrival, a subaltern who was not acquainted 
with Lawrence’s eccentricities inadvertently tipped 
him off to the fine affair that was to be staged for his 
benefit. Without stopping to pick up his uniform 
and kit at Shepheard’s Hotel, Lawrence hurried out 
to the headquarters of the Flying Corps at Helipolis, 
an oasis a few miles from Cairo, jumped into an 
aéroplane, and taxied back to Arabia. 

Not only did he care nothing for decorations, but 
he avoided wearing what ribbons he possessed. Cap- 
tain Ferdinand Tuohy, in his exploits of ‘““The Secret 
Corps,” says of him: “Colonel Lawrence was given 
the Companionship of the Bath for his services. 
He was actually recommended for the Victoria Cross, 
but was not granted that supreme decoration because 
there had never been a senior officer witness of his 
exploits—a Jame enough excuse, seeing that there 
was ample proof in a dozen ways that those exploits 
had well and truly been carried out.” As a matter 
of fact, although Lawrence was posted for the “C. 
B.,” he never attended any ceremony in connection 
with receiving it, and he asked his friends to side- 


LAWRENCE THE MAN 393 


track the recommendation for the Victoria Cross. 
He also stood aside when he had an opportunity to 
become a general at the time when his force was 
actually the right wing of Allenby’s army and when 
he was practically filling the réle of a lieutenant- 
general. He even declined knighthood. When I 
asked him why he didn’t want to be knighted, he 
replied: “Well, if I become a knight my tailor will 
hear about it and double my bills. I have trouble 
enough paying them as it is.” 

So far as I know there was only one thing that 
Lawrence wanted out of the war, and that was some- 
thing that he didn’t get. I asked him once if there 
was anything to be bought with money that he 
could n’t afford but would like to have. His answer, 
which he gave unhesitatingly, showed how human and 
simple he is. He replied, “I should like to have a 
Rolls-Royce car with enough tires and petrol to last 
me all my life.” The particular car that he would 
have liked to have had was the Rolls-Royce tender 
called the ““Blue Mist” which he used during some of 
his railway demolition raids around Damascus. But 
after the war it was overhauled and became Allenby’s 
personal car at the Residency in Cairo. 

Lawrence has often been criticized for refusing 
the various honors offered him. But the truth of the 
matter is that he did not decline them merely to be 
eccentric. For instance, before the war he was pre- 
sented with the Order of the Medjidieh by the sultan 
of Turkey for having saved the lives of some of the 


894 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Germans at work on the Berlin-to-Bagdad Railway 
when the natives were going to mob them. Then, 
shortly before the outbreak of the Arabian Revo- 
lution, while still a subordinate in Cairo, he received 
and accepted a number of decorations including the 
Legion of Honor. But he refused the rewards of- 
fered to him for what he had accomplished in Arabia 
because he had realized from the very beginning that 
the Allies, once victory was secured, would find it diffi- 
cult not only to satisfy the claims of the Arabs, but 
even to fulfil their obligations to the Hedjaz leaders. 
He realized full well that the French were determined 
to have Syria, and he knew all along that they would 
never agree to the Arabs’ even keeping Damascus. 
Lawrence therefore felt that he did not care to ac- 
cept anything in return for having conducted a cam- 
paign based on promises which the Allies could not 
fulfil to the extent to which he believed they ought 
to be fulfilled. Perhaps he would have felt differ- 
ently had he known that his friend Emir Feisal would 
be crowned king in Bagdad after losing the Syrian 
throne, which Lawrence foresaw he would never be 
allowed to occupy for long. But at the end of the 
war no one dreamed that Feisal was going to be the 
founder of a new dynasty in the city of Harun al 
Rashid after first being driven out of Damascus by 
the French. 

The only honor that Lawrence ‘accepted was one 
perhaps more dear to his heart than any other, a 
fellowship at All Souls’ College, Oxford. This 


LAWRENCE THE MAN 395 


fellowship is awarded to men of exceptional scholastic 
attainments. There are only a score or so of them, 
usually men past the prime of life who are completing 
important historical, literary, or scientific works. 
For example, Lord Curzon is a fellow at All Souls. 
The distinction is an unusual one. It carries with 
it a modest honorarium and attractive quarters at the 
college, a delightful place for a distinguished scholar 
to retire. There is no prescribed work that goes 
with it, and Lawrence once told me that there were 
but three requirements for a fellowship at All Souls: 
to be a good dresser, to be adept at small conversation, 
and to be a good judge of port. And then he added: 
“My clothes are an abomination; as a parlor con- 
versationalist I am hopeless, and I never drink. So 
how I came to receive this honor is a mystery to me.” 

After his election to All Souls, Lawrence divided 
his time between the college, the home of a friend in 
Westminster known as “the house with the green 
door,’ and a bungalow that he built for himself in 
Epping Forest. The porter at All Souls said they 
never knew when to expect him, that when he was in 
residence he rarely dined with the other fellows, and 
that the light in his studio usually burned all night. 
No doubt he was busy on his Arabian book. But he 
did the most of his writing at the “house with the 
green door,” where he occupied a bare room that had 
been an architect’s office. One of his friends had 
given him a fur-lined aviator’s costume, and in the 
dead of winter when the cold in London is decidedly 


396 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


penetrating he would sit in that bleak room in his 
fur-lined suit writing the inside story of his experi- 
ences in far-off Araby. 

On his frequent trips to Oxford he would carry his 
manuscript in a little black bag like those used by 
London bank-messengers. On one such occasion, af- 
ter he had gone through the gate to the platform at 
Paddington Station, he put the bag down for a mo- 
ment and walked over to the news-stand for a paper. 
When he returned, the bag was gone. It not only 
contained the only copy of his two-hundred-thousand- 
word manuscript, which he had written entirely in 
longhand, but it also contained the journal that he 
had kept faithfully through the desert campaign and 
many valuable original historical documents that can 
never be replaced. I saw him a few days later, and 
in telling me about the theft of the bag he referred to 
it jokingly and merely said: “I’ve been saved a lot 
of trouble, and after all it ’s a good thing the bag was 
stolen. The world is simply spared another war 
book.” 'The bag and its contents were never seen or 
heard of again. Lawrence’s theory was that they 
were probably thrown into the Thames by the disap- 
pointed thief, who had hoped for a better haul. But 
his friends finally prevailed upon him to rewrite the 
book; and this time, in order to find solitude, away 
from the curious admirers who were constantly dis- 
turbing him at All Souls, and a solitude that carried 
with it a means of keeping body and soul together, 
he enlisted in the Royal Air Force under the name of 


LAWRENCE THE MAN 397 


“Private Ross.” Even there he was unable to con- 
ceal his identity, and some one, for a consideration, 
tipped off a London newspaper, with the result that 
once more he found himself drawn into the lime-light. 
A. few weeks previous he had agreed to sell the publi- 
cation rights for, a large sum, but when this unex- 
pected publicity appeared he turned down the con- 
tract, left the Air Force, called on the various 
London editors imploring them to allow him to live 
in peace and print nothing more about him, and then 
vanished again. 

One of Colonel Lawrence’s hobbies is printing 
books by hand. There are few things that he likes 
more than an attractive book, and he has a valuable 
library of rare hand-printed volumes. On the edge 
of Epping Forest, some ten miles out from London, 
he built himself a little cottage with an interior re- 
sembling a chapel. Here he installed a hand-press. 
and when he finally finished his Arabian book he 
made six copies. A few were presented to friends, 
and one copy went to the British Museum Library 
to be locked up in a vault for forty years; that is, 
unless some one can prevail upon him to release it 
for publication. Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard 
Shaw, and several of Lawrence’s literary friends 
were among those to read it, and one of the most 
famous writers of the day declared that he considered 
it “a pyramid in English literature.” 

Lawrence has great literary ability and a style of 
his own. He is as individualistic in his writing as in 


398 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


everything else that he does. A number of brilliant 
articles have come from his pen since he put aside 
the curved gold sword of a shereef of Mecca, and he 
has written an introduction to a new edition of 
“Arabia Deserta” which all agree forms a valuable 
addition to that classic. Nor could he receive higher 
literary praise than that, for all Orientalists con- — 
cede that the foremost work ever published on Arabia 
is Charles Montagu Doughty’s “Travels in Arabia 
Deserta.” Lawrence says of it: “There is no sen- 
timent, nothing merely picturesque, that most com- 
mon failing of Oriental travel-books. Doughty’s 
completeness is devastating. It is a book which be- 
gins powerfully, written in a style which has appar- 
ently neither father nor son, so closely wrought, so 
tense, so just in its words and phrases, that it de- 
mands a hard reader.” 

But Doughty’s book had been out of print for 
many years, and copies of it were extremely rare. 
“We call the book ‘Doughty’ pure and simple,” adds 
Lawrence, “for it is a classic, and the personality of 
Mr. Doughty hardly comes into question. Indeed, 
it is rather shocking to learn that he is a real and liv- 
ing person. ‘The book has no date and can never 
grow old. It is the first and indispensable work 
upon the Arabs of the desert; and if it has not al- 
ways been referred to, or enough read, that has been 
because it was excessively rare.” 

So he set about to rectify this deficiency. He pro- 
posed that a new two-volume edition be published to 


LAWRENCE THE MAN 399 


sell for forty-five dollars, half what dealers had been 
asking for second-hand copies of the original. 
Doughty, an old man, had for years been devoting 
himself to poetry, and existing on a poet’s pittance. 
So Lawrence had at least three reasons for seeing a 
new edition published: to get the public better ac- 
quainted with a classic, to augment the income of his 
illustrious friend and predecessor, and to pay per- 
sonal tribute to one to whom he felt deeply indebted. 

In the preface Doughty says regarding Lawrence 
and the new edition: “A re-print has been called 
for; and is reproduced thus, at the suggestion chiefly 
of my distinguished friend, Colonel T. E. Lawrence, 
leader with Feysal, Meccan Prince, of the nomad 
tribesmen; whom they, as might none other at that 
time marching from Jidda, the port of Mecca, were 
able, (composing, as they went, the tribes’ long- 
standing blood feuds and old enmities), to unite with 
them in victorious arms, against the corrupt Turkish 
sovereignty in those parts: and who greatly thus serv- 
ing his Country’s cause and her Allies, from the 
Eastward, amidst the Great War, has in that imper- 
ishable enterprise, traversed the same wide region 
of Desert Arabia.” 

No sooner was the edition off the press than it was 
_ exhausted, and since then more editions have fol- 
lowed. So Lawrence’s ambition, to do something for 
Doughty, and gain for his classic a still wider circu- 
lation, was more than realized. Unquestionably the 
sale of “Arabia Deserta” was stimulated by the fact 


400 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


that Lawrence had written a special introduction to 
it in which he paid glowing tribute to the great trav- 
eler whose experiences in the desert had done so 
much to pave the way for his own success. Law- 
rence’s introduction to this new edition also gives us 
a hint as to his own skill with the pen and as to what 
we may expect from his own volume on Arabia. He 
writes: 


The realism of the book is complete. Doughty tries to 
tell the full and exact truth of all that he saw. If there is 
a bias it will be against the Arabs, for he liked them so 
much; he was so impressed by the strange attraction, isola- 
tion and independence of this people that he took pleasure 
in bringing out their virtues by a careful expression of their 
faults. ‘If one live any time with the Arab he will have all 
his life after a feeling of the desert.” He had experienced 
it himself, the test of nomadism, that most deeply biting of 
all social disciplines, and for our sakes he strained all the 
more to paint it in its true colours, as a life too hard, too 
empty, too denying for all but the strongest and most 
determined men. Nothing is more powerful and real than 
this record of all his daily accidents and obstacles, and the 
feelings that came to him on the way. His picture of the 
Semites, sitting to the eyes in a cloaca, but with their brows 
touching Heaven, sums up in full measure their strength 
and weakness, and the strange contradictions of their 
thought which quicken curiosity at our first meeting with 
them. 

To try and solve their riddle many of us have gone far 
into their society, and seen the clear hardness of their 
belief, a limitation almost mathematical, which repels us 


LAWRENCE THE MAN 401 


by its unsympathetic form. Semites have no half-tones in 
their register of vision. They are a people of primary 
colours, especially of black and white, who see the world al- 
ways in line. They are a certain people, despising doubt, 
our modern crown of thorns. They do not understand our 
metaphysical difficulties, our self-questionings. They know 
only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our 
hesitating retinue of finer shades. 

Semites are black and white not only in vision, but in 
their inner furnishing; black and white not merely in clar- 
ity, but in apposition. Their thoughts live easiest among 
extremes. They inhabit superlatives by choice. Some- 
times the great inconsistents seem to possess them jointly. 
They exclude compromise, and pursue the logic of their 
ideas to its absurd ends, without seeing incongruity in their 
opposed conclusions. They oscillate with cool head and 
tranquil judgment from asymptote to asymptote, so im- 
perturbably that they would seem hardly conscious of their 
giddy flight. 


Lawrence’s command of English is amazing, by 
reason, of course, of his familiarity with the classics 
and his knowledge of both ancient and modern lan- 
guages. His vocabulary is wider than that of most 
learned professors, and he has great descriptive pow- 
ers, as we have observed from his description of the 
death of his friend Tallal el Haredhin of Tafas. 

While in London and at All Souls, he lived much 
as he did in the desert. Indeed, from force of habit 
after his long experience in the East, he has become 
much like the Bedouins and has no desire for luxuries. 
He rarely eats or sleeps regularly, and says it is fatal 


402 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


if you are caught in an emergency to have formed 
regular habits. He usually goes without sleep one 
night a week and eats like a bird. It is his custom 
to sleep from three to ten in the morning and then 
take a long walk until three in the afternoon. Upon 
his return from his walk he would work until two 
in the morning, when he would go out for his dinner. 
The only places in London open at that unusual hour 
were the station restaurants, where he would tell the 
waiter to bring him anything he liked. He hates to 
order food, and a few minutes after he has had a meal 
he has forgotten what the dishes were. When walk- 
ing along the streets in London he is usually absorbed 
and pays no attention to anything until he comes to 
with a start and finds that a bus is about to run him 
down. 

In avoiding the network of modern complexities 
he seldom has to worry about the countless things 
that crowd the joy out of our ultra-civilized modern 
life. He has no private income and scorns money 
except what he needs for the simple necessities of 
life and for his one luxury, books. His mother once 
told me that he had always been a trial to her because 
she never knew what he was going to do next. He 
himself declares that he probably will never marry 
because “no woman would live with me.” 

Yet despite his scorn of money in private life, and 
his well nigh complete lack of it, while in the desert 
he had almost unlimited credit and could draw on 
his government up to many hundreds of thousands 


LAWRENCE THE MAN 403 


of pounds. It was by no means an uncommon sight 
to see him stuffing ten thousand pounds in gold sover- 
eigns in one camel-bag and ten thousand in another. 
Then off he would go with it, accompanied only by 
ten or twelve Bedouins. On one occasion Lawrence 
drew a paltry six hundred pounds from Major Scott 
“to do a bit of shopping.” Major Scott kept the 
boxes of sovereigns in his tent at headquarters in 
Akaba. Major Maynard, who was in charge of some 
of the records, heard of this and asked for a receipt. 
When Scott informed Lawrence, the latter nearly 
doubled up with laughter and said, “He shall have 
it!’ And so far as I could find out that was the only 
receipt he ever signed. As for the letters he received 
in the desert, he usually read them but then burned 
them and never bothered about answering. 

His has indeed been a strange existence, full of in- 
dividual experience. Fond of Oriental rugs, Law- 
rence picked up many rare ones during his wander- 
ings. On the floor of his tent at Akaba were two 
beauties. Lawrence slept on one of them, while his 
companion, Major Marshall, used a camp-bed. One 
of the two rugs is now in the possession of Lady 
Allenby, while Marshall has the other. One day in 
the bazaar in Jedda, Lawrence saw a barber kneeling 
on a prayer-rug that he liked. It had two holes in 
it three or four inches in diameter. 'The barber 
offered it to him for two pounds, and Lawrence 
bought it. When he took it to Cairo and had it 
appraised by one of the leading rug merchants of 


404 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


Egypt he found that it was worth about seventy 
pounds after being repaired. So Lawrence sent the 
barber a five-pound note. At his mother’s home in 
Oxford he had a pile of Oriental rugs and carpets still 
covered with the dust of the East. A friend of the 
family got married at a time when Lawrence was 
away, and his mother sent one of the rugs as a 
wedding gift. When the colonel returned she told 
him about the incident and said she presumed it was 
not worth much. “That one you gave away cost me 
147 pounds” ($665), replied Lawrence. But he was 
not the least bit vexed and promptly forgot all 
about it. 

When the year was up during which he had prom- 
ised to serve as Near Eastern advisor at the Colonial 
Office, Lawrence put on his hat and walked out. 
Since then he has found a new exhaust for his surplus 
energy. He met an army officer who had a high- 
power motor-cycle which was too much for the latter 
to handle. So Lawrence bought it and streaks it 
about England much as he formerly raced across the 
North Arabian Desert in the “Blue Mist.” 

When an undergraduate at Oxford, he and another 
student made a solemn compact that if either ever 
did anything particularly noteworthy he would wire 
for the other to come so that they could celebrate. 
In 1920 Lawrence telegraphed his friend as follows: 
“Come at once. Have done something.” This was 
the first word that had passed between the two since 
their pre-war college days. When the friend arrived 


LAWRENCE THE MAN 405 


this is what Lawrence had done that he thought worth 
celebrating: he had just finished his bungalow on the 
edge of Epping Forest, and was keeping cows! 
Epping Forest is a semi-national preserve of some 
sort, and there is a law that forbids the erection 
of non-movable structures. After Lawrence had 
finished his bungalow the police came and pointed 
out to him that he had broken the law because his 
house was a stationary edifice. So Lawrence bought 
some paint and made four camouflage red wheels 
on the sides of the cottage. This so amused the 
authorities that they said no more about the law. 
But not long afterward a fire wiped out nearly every- 
thing he had. 
_ As to what will happen to Lawrence in the future, 
only Allah knows. One thing is certain, that he will 
not permit his country to make a hero out of him. 
The maker of history has once more become the 
student of history. But Lawrence may live to see 
the effect of the wave that he rolled up out of the 
desert, in the form of an important new power in the 
East. As a result of the Arabian war of liberation, 
which was not a foolish dream on paper, and as a 
result of Allenby’s smashing campaign in Palestine 
and Syria, three new Arabian states have come into 
existence: the kingdom of Hedjaz under Hussein [, 
of Mecca; the independent state of Transjordania 
under Hussein’s second son, the Sultan Abdullah; 
and the kingdom of Iraq in Mesopotamia, where 
Hussein’s third son, King Feisal I, occupies the 


406 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


throne. It is the dream of these three, assisted by 
Hussein’s eldest son, the Emir Ali, who remains in 
Mecca, one day to form a United States of Arabia. 

Much depends on King Feisal. Colonel Law- 
rence played the dominate part in making him the 
greatest Arab in five centuries. But the task before 
Feisal is stupendous. He has vision and high ideals 
for his people. Will he be strong enough to main- 
tain his position in Bagdad and remain the leading 
figure in the Arabian world? Events are now 
moving swiftly in the Near East. If King Feisal 
can, through the quiet force of his personality, con- 
tinue the work of wiping out the ancient quarrels 
between the tribes and cities of the desert in which 
task he and his father and brothers were given such 
effective help by Lawrence, and if the nations of the 
West will send railway, sanitary, and irrigation engi- 
neers and disinterested military and political advisers; 
codperate in the establishment of schools; and lend 
financial support, the glory that once was Babylon’s 
may come again in Mesopotamia. The future of 
King Feisal and his brothers may be the future of 
Arabia. None may know the end of the story. But 
one thing is certain, and that is that Feisal, like 
his romantic predecessor, Harun al Rashid of the 
Arabian Nights, is a just and merciful monarch; 
but had it not been for the youthful Lawrence, Feisal 
would not be ruling in Bagdad to-day, nor would his 
brother Abdullah be the sultan of Transjordania, nor 
would the Arabs recently have had the opportunity 


LAWRENCE THE MAN 407 


to proclaim King Hussein as the Calif of all Islam 
and Commander of the Faithful. For it was this 
young man who destroyed the thousand-year-old net- 
work of blood-feuds, who built up the Arabian army, 
who planned the strategy of the desert campaign and 
led the Arabs into battle, who swept the Turks from 
a thousand miles of country between Mecca and 
Damascus, who was the brains of the epic Arabian 
campaign and rode in triumph through the bazaars of 
Damascus, and established a government for Prince 
Feisal in the capital of Omar and Saladin, the oldest 
surviving city in the world. But without a com- 
plete understanding of the mentality and instinct of 
Arabia, and without a sincere love for the peoples of 
the desert, this would never have been possible. Nor 
is it surprising that with such love and understanding 
from such a man, translated into successful policies 
and glorious deeds, he won the adoration of the Arab 
race. 

Little did young Lawrence dream, when he was 
studying Hittite ruins, that it was his destiny to play 
a major role in building a new empire, instead of 
piecing together, for a scholar’s thesis, the fragments 
of a dead-and-buried kingdom. Captain Tuohy has 
tersely said in his brief note in “The Secret Corps,” 
for “romantic adventure his career has probably been 
unexampled in this or in any other war.” 

This twenty-eight-year-old poet and scholar had 
started across the Arabian Desert in February, 1916, 
to raise an army, accompanied by only three compan- 


408 WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA 


ions. I do not know of a more helpless task than 
this that has been essayed during the last thousand 
years. ‘They at first had no money, no means of 
transportation except a few camels, and no means of 
communication except camel-riders. They were try- 
ing to raise and equip an army in a country which has’ 
no manufacturing interests, which produces very little 
food and less water. In many parts of Arabia water- 
holes are a five days’ camel trek apart. ‘They had ne 
laws to help them, and they were trying to raise an 
army among the nomadic Bedouin tribes that had 
been separated from one another by blood-feuds for 
hundreds of years. They were trying to unify a peo- 
ple who quarrel over the possession of the water-holes 
and pasture-lands of Arabia, and war with one an- 
other for the possession of camels; a people who, when 
they meet one another in the desert, usually substitute 
volleys of pot-shots for the conventional rules of 
Oriental courtesy. 

In habit, instinct, and mental outlook Europe is 
utterly at variance with Asia, and it is rarely, only 
once in hundreds of years, that there comes forward 
some brilliant Anglo-Saxon, Celt, or Latin who, 
possessing an understanding that transcends race, 
religion, and tradition, can adopt the Kastern temper- 
ament at will. Such men were Marco Polo, the 
Venetian, and General Charles Gordon. Sucha man 
is Thomas Edward Lawrence, the modern Arabian. 
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$5.00, for a fraction of their former prices. 


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Librakseuet, bound handsomely in cloth and printed 
on good paper, each with a specially designed jackets 


6. PERMANENCE. The Star Books offer a witle 
choice of subjects and titles, authors of lasting fame, 
and durable bindings—the three requisites for your 
permanent home library. 








